Emma has been before but a long time ago. Even so I think both of us are going to be a little like this when we get there…

See you on the other side.

*Some of the comments on Instagram not my description.

I’m also twitchy and nervous of any sudden moves by vehicles around me whilst on my bike. Someone came a bit close turning in front of me today. I was going straight on and he was waiting to go right, facing my direction of travel. He’d judged my speed and was going to tuck in and turn behind me. I crapped myself and shouted at him. I had no idea whether he’d seen me or not and was waiting to ruin another bike. I seem to remember it took about six months to get over it last time. I suspect that I’m still not going to be enjoying cycling in London for a while yet.

I seemed to have lost my nerve a little after being knocked off earlier in the week but seemed to have got it back together by the time I left. Enjoyed the trail down to the Peaslake carpark immensely. Felt like I needed to take some pictures but ran out of ideas. So the usual tress and bike will have to do.

I’ve been riding in London since 2005 and rode here before in 2001 for a while. I consider myself reasonably experienced and am always careful of undertaking vehicles at junctions and always look into their left mirror at them to see if they’re about to make a turn without indicating. I also watch the front wheel which gives a slightly later indication of their turn and allows me to stop or take evasive action if needed. But what was so annoying about this is that I was in front of the traffic, I wasn’t undertaking, I had the front position on the road so he must have come around me and across my path. I can only assume that he just wasn’t looking at all, perhaps I was in his blind spot at the front on his left column on the windscreen. Maybe he was looking at his mirror behind but I was in front? Who knows.

So I checked my bike at scene, both wheels were fine but it wasn’t until I rode off that I realised the force of the impact had bent the drive side crank arm. As I thought there wasn’t anything wrong I didn’t get his number which is my own stupid fault. My wrist was a bit sore and a nice bruise and road rash has developed on my hip but I count myself lucky that it wasn’t a faster collision or a bigger vehicle.

It’s the second time I’ve been knocked off in London, the first was a car pulling out of a side street and I went straight over the bonnet. This has shaken me up much much more due to the way it came from the side without me seeing anything or having any inclination that something was about to go wrong. Best not to dwell on it too much and get back on the bike I think.

I saw this news start to break and then got a Tweet from Olly Wainwright saying:

@andymatthews did you see you just appeared in Flickr’s presentation in NY?

So, click through the link and what… yes that’s my photo being shown live to millions of people, below a picture of Barack Obama! See 5:27:33, or as below. I’m thrilled that my photo was shown in this context!

So how did this come about? Well a while back I bitched and moaned about Flickr and the lack of development. This got a few retweets and some traffic to my site as well as catching the attention of two Flickr engineers, pkingdesign and spierisf. The former was the one who contacted me with the offer of a t-shirt. Shortly after this a series of improvements were made as well as a new iPhone app.

But today is a series of even bigger and better improvements, I’m still looking around it but first glance it looks incredible. I just wish I had chosen a different URL all those years ago!

partridgegetslucky.com