1 4 the 4x4 haters



"John_Kane" <[email protected]> wrote:
| Tony Raven wrote:
| > http://www.cyberpictures.net/trams/
|
| Heartwarming. :)

It's a pity the pedestrian bonebreaker bars weren't wider, I suppose.
This reminds me of the time I got caught between two buses. I was on a
bicycle.

It was before the Last Great Traffic Manglement Reform in Oxford (known
as the "Oxford Transport Strategy" in boring Manglement Speak). In those
days, when it were all trees round 'ere, and the High was not closed to
all the traffic it is now partly closed to, as well as all the traffic that
it is not closed to, you used often to get three double-deckers side by
side in the bits of the High that can just about take three double-deckers.
It was a double-decker that disappeared down the collapsed sewer at
Carfax, after all. These days, they're all single deckers, but you still
get them three abreast at times.

I was between two of them, facing in the same direction (east), the one
on my left stationary at a stop, the one on my right overtaking me at
almost zero revolutions, when the one on my left started to move out and
the one on my right moved in to allow a third to come the other way. You
can doubtless imagine. A pair of double-deckers slowly converging on you,
Edgar Allen Poe stylee, could incite claustrophobia in an agoraphobe.

My claim is always to have been saved by my bars - handle, not bull -
which were in those days wider than me. They made quite a dent in one
of the buses, but not the other. It's the only time I've ever needed to
hammer on the sides of two buses simultaneously.

It's probably the bars that have got narrower, because I still fit in my
one and only twenty-seven year old suit. Perhaps my bars are still wider
than me, but that my perception of how much wider they would need to be
has changed. Perhaps I should wear a h*lm*t.