Accidents.

[wwidsith]

Ten minutes before I need to go to work, and I've just run into the Ducat over the road desperate to get something down about this city, and feeling full of tiny epiphanies the way I always do when I cycle to work. It's cold now, winter's basically arrived and my hands are freezing on the handlebars, but by the time I get up to the river I've

Comments

[herself_nyc]

Marvelous.

[norabird]

Your writing on Paris, as much as it makes me long to go back and be there myself, makes me love New York a bit more intensely too; the fierce joy in the city itself that you have brings my own fierce joys for my own city stir from where they too often rest.

[hazel_shea]

I love this post. Now that I have seen Paris, I am enjoying being able to visualise the places you describe; the names and places are actually real instead of just blank words I don't recognise. As a regular commuting cyclist I recognise everything you describe. I found that I quite rapidly became a reckless cyclist - but I think that pissing off the drivers is better than them not noticing you at all. I also sit at the lights blowing on my hands to warm them up. It has suddenly got a little bitter in the mornings, and metal bars make for frozen fingers. Before I left work the other night I took some thermal gloves from the lost property box.
My family and friends often fret about the dangers I face in cycling every day in the city, and I still carry on despite coming off my bike yesterday and almost going under a car (chain broke). I read something brilliant the other day, a quote from someone on the British Medical Association. He said 'the only thing more dangerous than cycling is not cycling'.