Scarier Than The Asda Roundabout

Ride in today and the nice weather seems to have brought more people out onto their bikes. I try desperately to get someone to say 'Good Morning' to me but only one person out of about twenty does so. I acknowledge almost everyone I see on a bike regardless of whether they're a serious cyclist or not, whether they are young or old, male or female. Miserable bunch.

At work another chap makes he's debut on the bike. It's starting to get a bit crowded in the executive bike park, e.g. there's not much room left on the fence we chain them to.

It's an exciting morning for Doggo; he's out on a new paper round. Son has had his round changed. Doggo will soon get the hang of it.

Son's got his second GCSE exam today, English Literature and he's allowed to take his textbook in to the exam with him to pick out relevant quotes. Anything to allow the schools to keep those grades increasing.

Bad news on the play off front. Graham Poll is refereeing our final. So Forest v Yeovil was not his last game. Somehow he's going to need to top the Prutton incident if he's going to go out with a bang. Doesn't bode well.

On my way home, I almost get wiped out by this teenager on his bike. I was on the cycle path around Pride Park, minding my own business, and he came towards me weaving horrendously from side to side, headphones on, rucksack slung over one shoulder and scraping against his rear wheel, his hood was so far over his eyes he wouldn’t have been able to see where he was going even if he'd been looking in the right direction, which he wasn't. There seemed to be something very interesting in the sky. I was forced off the path, onto the grass verge and behind a lamppost for safety, as he wobbled past.

Then I heard a crash and turned round expecting to see him lying in a heap but no, he'd just dropped his rucksack. He had at least noticed this fact and had stopped. Now he was fishing behind him with his arm for his missing bag without much luck as he was still examining the sky. You can see why A-level results are on the rise.

In the evening, I head off for a swim at Noel Street. It's packed. Despite being told by reception that it was an adult laned session, there were no lanes in place. Instead the pool had divided itself by a form of natural selection, psychos on one side, and paddlers on the other. Worryingly I had to side with the psychos because I couldn't face weaving round the paddlers.

It was totally mad on the psycho side. There were four chaps and two women doing front crawl, fast. The women were menacing super fit types with tattoos and they were doing flip turns, as I found out to my surprise when I was swimming behind one and she suddenly disappeared and then reappeared coming towards me, having done a flip turn, with nowhere else to go she swam under me.

After that I dare not let my gaze deviate from the front. Normally I like to check out other people's techniques and perhaps the odd female swimsuit but it wasn't safe to look anywhere other than forwards. Swimmers would appear out of the murky water like something from Jaws and you'd have just a split second or two to roll sideways to let them pass. Somehow I always seemed to choose the right way to roll because if we'd both gone the same way there could have been a nasty head on collision. It was the scariest moment of my life since I'd cycled round the Asda roundabout two hours earlier.

Occasionally a paddler would stray across to our side of the pool but they soon scuttled back once they'd been buzzed by a few psychos.

I would like to think that, as they sat watching this chaos, the pool attendants were thinking 'oh shit we forgot to put the lanes in' but somehow I doubt they noticed that a nasty accident was only ever a split second away.

Get home and L does Salmon and mash for tea.

Then I take L to bed for an exhausting game of soldiers.