As part of an ongoing bike odyssey, I just did about 30km on a stretch of road with rather too many cars for comfort. That’s to say, about a couple per minute in each direction. So hardly any, but still way too many for me.

The appearance of lights in the mirror, the rising din, the need to carefully keep a straight line to minimize risk, the rush of wind, the parting gift of NOx and PM10. As an aside, the pollution issue has always been my main objection to private cars, since it’s so obviously unfair to eject your toxic effluent behind you. In the case of cigarettes, at least the smoker actually has to inhale the smoke before everyone else does!

Perhaps the most annoying of all: the motorists who want to help. They creep up behind you and hang around, waiting for a good moment to overtake even though there’s not another car on the horizon. Often when this happens I’m actually riding on the hard shoulder, but no, it’s not enough for them! “Get in the ditch so I have some more space, it’s safer”, they seem to say. When finally it’s good enough, they (and often the tail of traffic they’ve accumulated) will step on the gas and leave me in a cloud of diesel fumes. Absolutely. Infuriating.

These are the kind of experiences that remind me why for many years I hardly got on a bike. For me, the main problem with cycling has never been the physical effort or the discomfort. It’s the damn cars.