Cycling UK Forum

brooksby wrote:And how cars are always turning themselves over or running themselves off the road, etc. Anyone would think that they were some sort of wild or semi-domesticated animal rather than a machine

Mike Sales wrote:

brooksby wrote:And how cars are always turning themselves over or running themselves off the road, etc. Anyone would think that they were some sort of wild or semi-domesticated animal rather than a machine

Yes, cars get out of control. It takes a skilled driver to rein them in, and sometimes the car wins the struggle!
Do bikes never run amok? Like the machines in The Third Policeman which are more than half human?

brooksby wrote:
"Is it about a bicycle...?"

“The gross and net result of it is that people who spent most of their natural lives riding iron bicycles over the rocky roadsteads of this parish get their personalities mixed up with the personalities of their bicycle as a result of the interchanging of the atoms of each of them and you would be surprised at the number of people in these parts who are nearly half people and half bicycles...when a man lets things go so far that he is more than half a bicycle, you will not see him so much because he spends a lot of his time leaning with one elbow on walls or standing propped by one foot at kerbstones.”
― Flann O'Brien, The Third Policeman

‘The last hanging we had in this parish,’ he said, ‘was thiry years ago. It was a very famous man called MacDadd. He held the record for the hundred miles on a solid tyre. I need to tell you what the solid tyre did for him. We had to hang the bicycle.’
‘Hang the bicycle?’
‘MacDadd had a first-class grudge against another man called Figgerson but he did not go near Figgerson. He knew how things stood and gave Figgerson’s bicycle a terrible thrashing with a crowbar. After that MacDadd and Figgerson had a fight and Figgerson – a dark man with glasses – did not live to know who the winner was. There was a great wake and he was buried with his bicycle. Did you ever see a bicycle-shaped coffin?’

Mike Sales wrote:And if "the cyclist collided with the car" is a neutral statement, then "the wall collided with the car" would make sense,