Youth

Coming down the dual purpose path running alongside the stream running along Longmead Road this morning, I was passed by a youth on a bicycle coming the other way. Hood up, hands and eyes on his mobile phone.

For myself, while I often wore a duffle coat while cycling, I rarely had the hood up, even in the rain, because of the way the hood restricted both hearing and peripheral vision. One was much less aware of what was going on behind one, coming up behind one.

While working the mobile phone is taking most of one's attention off the road, and speaking for myself again, I have noticed while driving, that if I am, for example, taking a swig from the bottle of water I keep in the central reservation, and there is a sudden need to take action, the reflexes are much keener on not dropping the bottle than on getting both hands back on the steering wheel. Not good at all. I imagine this would be even more true in the case of a rather more expensive mobile phone.

So while this young man, one of several I have seen at the same game over the past week or so, was in reasonable control, I would think that his ability to respond to the unexpected was badly compromised. Not that telling him would be likely to do much good in the absence of some good excuse to interfere.

PS: I plead guilty, over the years, to doing a fair amount of cycling without holding on, mainly for show or for the challenge of it, but never without paying extra attention to what I was doing and to the road around me. Never with a hood. Never with a  mobile phone. Never on a busy road (not that today's path counted as one of those).