cyclist-hating knows no borders
my first week of work in scotland has drawn to a close. i was able to ride into the office four days this week, most of it not in the rain, for a total of 80 miles. it has worked out well. i ride in with a dude named jeremy who lives about two blocks from my flat.
a fair part of our ride is on a bike path that runs through the housing estates, which are, in case you don’t know, what they call the projects. only they look maybe 20x nicer than any housing projects i’ve ever seen.
every day as we ride the path, there’s a family that walks toward us three-across. they don’t leave us much room, so jeremy and i ride two-up so as not to run them down. every day they yell at us to slow down (we’re not traveling quickly). today when they yelled at us, jeremy called the woman a fucking idiot. (it’s true, she is a fucking idiot. though the only proof i have of this is that she uses her 8-year-old as a traffic-calming device.) the fucking idiot was not pleased at being called out.
then jeremy did something that i probably wouldn’t have done — he went back to a) apologize and b) have a reasonable discourse about proper use of a shared bike/pedestrian path. i thought he was gonna get himself punched. nope, just a lot of yelling, culminating with the fucking idiot taking out a copy of highway code from her bag and waving it at jeremy.
during lunch, when jeremy recounted this story, i learned a new word: knack (more specifically: fucking knack) — [from urban-dictionary.com] rough young people living in cities and towns in certain ares of Ireland wearing burberry hats tracksuit pant/short jeans and celtic jerseys with a few bulldog tattoos.
turns out they’re not only limited to ireland.
later that afternoon on the ride home, a different set of fucking knacks threw a plastic bottle at me from a car window, giving me opportunity to use the latest addition to my vocabulary.
jeremy has jury service on monday, leaving me to deal with the fucking knacks on my own. thanks, dude.