I cycled to work tonight

to see how long it would take.

It turns out that it is not the distance that is the problem, but that fact that I have less road-sense than a five year old child.

I'd jumped a number of kerbs on the way down and on the way back was showboating for the crowd when I found myself flying through the air towards a predictable but unavoidable end sliding across a pavement towards the nettles.

On initial inspection I decided my left hand was broken, my left arm scraped beyond repair, both kneecaps shattered and one shinbone well and truly barked, not to mention the right hand lacerated by and impregnated with gravel. I got up and walked twenty metres to a bus stop, hyperventilating with shock and threatening to simultaneously faint and throw up, culminating in a messy and unpleasant death.

I settled for collapsing into a heap and sweating profusely before deciding that I couldn't phone for help because I would have to abandon my bike there on the road, to be taken by urban foxes in their quest for dominance. The prospect of walking it back was too humiliating so I taped my hands around the handlebars and rode like the winner I am.

Now I'm afraid to go to sleep because the continued kinetic movement is all that's keeping my hands from morphing into wooden gnarls and I know that the moment I stop moving that's it, I'm going to have to have both ragged claws amputated. I'll have to stop learning to straighten my hair and start learning to type with hooks for hands.

A life as an extremist muslim cleric is now all that awaits me, when all I wanted was to practice for the day the oil runs out.