Immediately following the accident, I was sitting on my rear feeling a little embarrassed while my mind sets into a type overdrive, ‘how did, am I dead, is this life after dead. ok, i am not dead, proof: conscious thoughts. Am I concussed, how is it I am not even concussed’. Believe me you know, instant concussion is pretty scary. A soft hand tenderly touches my shoulder alerting me in an instant, attentively I shake off the embarrassment, “are you alright,” she says. “I uhm”, only stumbles from my mouth without any other words to be found. She helps me to my feet with a concerned and caring set into her eyes. “Your head is bleeding”, she says. Her observation immediately startled me into a somewhat vein realization.

Very recently I had started shaving my head and my immediate focus transfixed on self-image and my perfectly shaped egg head. The consequences of knocks and grazes sprung into my mind. In most road accidents gravel burn road rash is worsened by speed. If there remained any forward momentum when landing, was going to leave the new bald look truly messed up with a skull peeled back to bone and sizable scares. Standing up and carefully pulling the red baseball cap from my head, I asked, how bad is it? She replies nodding her head, ‘well it's bad.’ I ask her to clarify, bad. “Does it look as if my head has hit and skidded or is the damage more of an impregnation of the road?”, I asked. Thankfully, her terminology of bad referred only to the comic sized elongated golf ball now popped out of my head.

It is then I hear a witnesses from the crowd, egregiously describing the accident to the van driver. “You were busy waving and screaming in road rage at the other driver and failing to notice you were taking off through a red light. I watched you from start to end,” he finished with. And I noted, wow people are angry and this time it is not at me. London cyclists getting hounded by press and public had become an everyday norm making the peoples directed anger always pointed at the cyclist. Depending on the amount of negative media attention and so much so, under most circumstances cyclists are deemed the danger and always in the wrong. One is killed on an intersection, green light or not, opinions are they should not have been there.

If only people instead of becoming overly aggressive towards the cyclist and making life way more dangerous, could become just that little more aware about the multiple reasons behind the periods of bad press. Apart from providing highly emotional issues for public distractions from reality or used like a timestamp gap for legacy media news, to follow is their multi purpose goal which only include campaigns of revenue collecting. I guess visually seeing the consequence to a pathetic and all too common idiotic road mentality can drive the most placid of pedestrians into rage. Against the media programmed odds suddenly they came to defend me the cyclist. I had so many fuelled by anger witnesses the claiming of a small fortune and £15,000 was the done deal. Or perhaps they remained in interest behind, wondering if the guy who had landed on his helmetless head would suddenly drop dead.*

I look up and just like in a dream falling from the sky to see the worlds ground rushing in filling my eyes, I see the van that is fast accelerating straight into my red zone. The Red zone is the un-avoided crash zone and you in an eye-popping split moment just know avoidance will not be avoided. The vehicle gathering in speed fast did not look like a vehicle that would or could stop before passing straight through the red zone.

A reflex’s slam on the front brake, hurtling me over the handlebars into an upside-down position. With eyes still transfixed to the van and from the reverse side up I glimpse the passenger arms frantically trying to alert the driver to the front. Not a 1000th of a second to spare the driver spins his head while simultaneously slamming on his brakes. Luckily the van stopped halfway into the cycle lane as I collide with the van at the exact point of stop. At that point the suspension had fully bottomed out with the front bumper just inches from the road.

Like a flash moving photograph I see the bumper in line with my head. My body was like a sponge and moulded to the front fitting comfortably like fingers in a glove. Right shoulder slipped above and on the bumper and hips to legs sprawled from bottom to top of the window screen as the wipers took grip of my side clothing. I skid across the face of the van and the bounce from the spring-loaded suspension pushes me off, throwing me clear of the van with only more elevation. The van stopped all spin momentum and now upside down free from the van and free as if floating in a space and time with this one thought paused in my neural pathways, a synchronistic thought.

This exact same thought had arrived for the second time during a cycle accident which at first, I needed to return. The first time in the background of my thoughts are the mysteries from my previous two drama filled days. For six weeks I had ridden my cycle from London to Lagos, Portugal and the release from a highly adrenalized esoteric adventure was immense. Another story which finished off with a long downhill to the Portugal’s coast and a relieving period while now in traffic and feeling finally safe from the extremely isolated roads that lay path through the large forestries. A story that is integrally connected to this story but nobody at present will believe it.

My legs were feeling surprisingly great after the previous day's quick 170 km. So, I started to envision how great it would be to ride back to London via the east coast of Spain and not let the previous two-day misadventure affect me. An absolute barney idea and not planned; among other things I could ill afford the time let alone the ride and despite everything the temptation was only building. My life was never rational and was not going to start now. For one thing the psychopaths and dangers in the world I did not want to let get the better of me.

My more immediate thoughts were about all the London Road and cycle accidents previously I'd been in. A common variable to four out of five previous accidents was firstly going over the handlebars. I had been in accidents not countless times but too many times and in all of them I noticed that my hands had saved me from what could have been quite serious injuries. While riding my bike in the south of Portugal I was marvelling to myself about the speed of my reactionary hands and how they seemed so instinctive at saving injuries to the head. And in this moment, I wondered if it was actually possible that they would instinctively “always” save me. At that moment, a notification arrived on my phone mounted on the handlebars. I reached for the phone feeling a little uncomfortable with one hand on the bars and that voice that said you should not be doing this just now. Ignoring that voice and uncharacteristic of the day, a tornado whirlwind of sand and dust wisped up on my left bursting from the trees. Catching me by surprise the gusty force blew me sideways until both wheels trapped side on to a smallest at about one inch and a half change in height paths, as it was a bus stop built for wheelchair access.