Sports desk with Neasden Postlethwaite
Top tip: On your ride home, do not try to keep up with the cyclo-cross enthusiast on the Ti road bike when it is your first day back in the saddle after a month of lung-bugs and you are riding the hybrid with the panniers and the BFO U-lock.
Still, all good fun and gosh but doesn't the world smell nice? Damp earth, wild garlic, diesel, creosote, organophosphates, rusty steel... Hurrah for Sustrans and the Bristol-Bath cycle path.
Anyway. A random sort of conversation with mater (as if there were any other sort) brought to mind road accidents. When I was tiny, we used to live about equidistant from Winchcombe and Andoversford. Andoversford had a cattle market, a couple of pubs and Victory Mechanics, who were the local (Ford/New Holland) agricultural engineers. As a result, we'd go there fairly regularly.
You'll note from the Google link above that the section of A40 there is a dual carriageway. That's relatively recent. This is a pre-Beeching picture of the place.
Anyway, when the post-Beeching bypass was instantiated, there were no traffic lights on the A40/A436 junction, or indeed a haven for cars turning right off the A40 in either direction.
There were A Lot of messy road-accidents. Since this was before proper seatbelts, safety cells, decent brakes and paramedics, I suspect all the fire brigade could do would be collect the body parts, hose the blood off the road and then tow the twisted wreckage to the forecourt to Tubb's Garage. (bottom left in the second picture) Which as a small child I would goggle at from the Land-Rover, Renault 16 or Ford Corsair window. I don't remember what I thought about them. More than likely I would try to identify what the mangled heaps of tinwork had been. Were I more of a lying bastard than I already am, I'd claim some Ballardian coincidence and make out that I was trying to work out the relative trajectories of the vehicles involved. However I was five or six, indeed probably even younger.
I don't know where I'm going with this. ladymoonray jogged something related in the back of my head the other week, and I'm not even sure I'd thought about that other thing properly before then.
Strange business, life.
Still, all good fun and gosh but doesn't the world smell nice? Damp earth, wild garlic, diesel, creosote, organophosphates, rusty steel... Hurrah for Sustrans and the Bristol-Bath cycle path.
Anyway. A random sort of conversation with mater (as if there were any other sort) brought to mind road accidents. When I was tiny, we used to live about equidistant from Winchcombe and Andoversford. Andoversford had a cattle market, a couple of pubs and Victory Mechanics, who were the local (Ford/New Holland) agricultural engineers. As a result, we'd go there fairly regularly.
You'll note from the Google link above that the section of A40 there is a dual carriageway. That's relatively recent. This is a pre-Beeching picture of the place.
Anyway, when the post-Beeching bypass was instantiated, there were no traffic lights on the A40/A436 junction, or indeed a haven for cars turning right off the A40 in either direction.
There were A Lot of messy road-accidents. Since this was before proper seatbelts, safety cells, decent brakes and paramedics, I suspect all the fire brigade could do would be collect the body parts, hose the blood off the road and then tow the twisted wreckage to the forecourt to Tubb's Garage. (bottom left in the second picture) Which as a small child I would goggle at from the Land-Rover, Renault 16 or Ford Corsair window. I don't remember what I thought about them. More than likely I would try to identify what the mangled heaps of tinwork had been. Were I more of a lying bastard than I already am, I'd claim some Ballardian coincidence and make out that I was trying to work out the relative trajectories of the vehicles involved. However I was five or six, indeed probably even younger.
I don't know where I'm going with this. ladymoonray jogged something related in the back of my head the other week, and I'm not even sure I'd thought about that other thing properly before then.
Strange business, life.