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@Mmerino
I had a fantastic ride recently from London up to a friend's house in Suffolk. I followed the Dunwich Dynamo roue for most of the way, using an old route sheet - a great ride, zipping out through Epping Forest and into Essex, all pretty villages and wide open spaces, the rape flowering, blossom on the trees, a fresh breeze behind me, bees and lambs frolicking in the fields: all bucolic bliss. I was making great time, flying through fields towards friends, food and tequila at the other end.
Until a place called Sudbury, where I hit heavy traffic. I took th ecentre of my lane, waiting for an opening to move onto a busy roundabout, when suddenly something shoed me hard from behind. It felt like a violent attack, like someone was telling me to get out of the way, get onto the roundabout. Then I went down. Except I don't remember falling, or scrambling out form under a car. All I remember is being on my feet, rushing back towards the scene I must have been part of, shouting at a car, which had my bike wedged under it. "Jesus fucking Christ! What the fuck are you doing?" I was incensed, but then I saw the driver - a girl with her hands round her face hyperventilating, having some kind of panic attack. She thought she'd just killed someone.
It took her much longer to calm down than me. She was such a mess, it was hard to stop treating her lik eth evictim, to get her to calm down and stop panicking. I remembered to pay attention to myself and work out if I was hurt. In fact I was fine - just bleeding from grazes and shaking a bit from fright and anger. The girl's boyfriend reversed the car off my bike and weirdly it was fine too - just the pedal and bar scrapped from the tarmac.
She was babbling: her dad was a cyclist, she could have killed me, she's such a bad person, where was I going, where had I come from. It didn't make sense to her that I was frm London and she burst into tears again, "you came all that way then I nearly killed you". Just an awful scene.
I made the rest of the journey and still enjoyed it, but I went over the experence again and again. I must have been right in the centre of her field of view, bang in fornt of her in broad daylight and she just drove over me. I can picture how and why it happened, but it's made me a bit fearful now. Maybe I had lost a bit of assertiveness, but a ciuple of weeks later a car cut straight across me on a roundabout at 40mph, narrowly missing me to take an exit. Again it felt like an attack. Had I pissed him off further back somehow? Or was he just oblivious like the girl had turned out to be? At the end of the day if someone nearly kills you, it doesn't matter if they're hapless or just insanely aggressive. Or maybe it does - I still haven't worked it out.