It's a Dad's Life:I can't sleep because my ribs are killing me. Cycling through Fairview the other night a genius in a parked Almera decided to fling open his door as I trundled past. I threw the bike to the right but still caught the door with my midriff going by, landing in a bundle in the bus lane. A taxi skidded up, then just sat there with his beams on me, haloed like a lummox, sitting in the road.
I have been biking round Dublin for 25 years and that's the first time I've been hit. But in the past month two accidents involving cyclists have happened in my vicinity. On all three occasions, including my own tumble, the driver has been to blame, executing a move without checking his mirrors to see what's going by. And on each occasion, again including my own, the cyclist limps off the road mortified, while the driver grumbles and checks his bumpers for damage. It's an embarrassment of schoolyard- memory proportions to be put on your backside, in public, as you're going about your business.
So I did the sensible thing and waved away the driver, telling him, "I'm grand, I'm grand. Just let me walk it off, I'll be grand." Wanting nobody looking at me, nobody clucking, I just wanted to get back on the saddle and get out of there because I was scarlet. Which is a pity because now I must either spend a day in the Mater waiting for an X-ray, or cough up for a convenient visit to the VHI clinic, without even my assailant's name and address - which he would have had to give me on the spot. If I'd asked.
The sore ribs, combined with the cough from my "man-cold" (note, "man-cold" is a far more serious condition than the "common cold" that women suffer from, something everyone in a relationship is aware of), has me more than grumpy. My mood has moved beyond black, beyond rage at fellow road users to an anger at the city itself. In 12 months I have spent one week outside city limits; I am over-exposed to the urban.
In another recent incident, I only just managed to convince the younger child not to come with me to the local shop as I wanted to buy bread and be home within two minutes rather than the 15 it becomes if she accompanies me. This proved a fortunate decision. As I approached the corner I was greeted by a track-suited young man with his penis in his hand merrily urinating, not against the wall, but directly down my road. It was 6pm.
I simply stated, "Oh you're beautiful." His response? "Are you looking at my dick? Ye faggot."
"I'm not the one waving my member at strange men in the middle of the day."
He lurched at me and I saw his compadres, sitting in their idling GTi on the kerb, get ready to move. I backtracked home and waited a respectable time before venturing out again for my loaf.
A couple of weeks earlier a 12-year-old girl informed me that I was a "lanky prick" because I wouldn't buy her Bacardi Breezers in that same shop.
These things in isolation, they're no more than pub stories with the lads. Put them all together, with my mind turning towards the girls growing up, and I don't want to be here. The elder could be the one abusing punters on the street for not getting her booze.
And if it was only ever booze, that would be sweet relief. The younger could march in the door with her first boyfriend and I may recognise more than his face from an encounter on the street corner. It doesn't fill me with hope.
The city is at once shining and filthy. Right now I am relating to Travis Bickle in Taxi Driveras a person in a documentary rather than a character in a feature film.
