Mind The Gap

Found myself in a conversation last night about that thing where you entirely misread something. You know, you glance at a newspaper headline, or see a poster, and you think 'No! Wait, that can't be right ...' before looking back at the not-so offending words, and working out that, no, that can't be right, and what you thought was a mildly offensive comment outside your local church was just a reference about your ship coming in to dock.

Occasionally, the mis-read can make you think that you've seen words that, on further investigation, look nothing like the words you thought they were. But, sometimes, you can see where the connect was. I mentioned that every time I'm at the train station, I get briefly confused by a sign above the locked up bikes that says 'bicycle facilities'. For some reason, I keep reading it as 'bicycle fatalities'. As my friend pointed out, that's the sort of thing that tends to happen in a Final Destination movie when fate is attempting to give a heads up to the next victim that death is gearing up to dispatch them in a violent, grisly, and bizarrely amusing manner.

So, anyway, this morning I was cycling on my way to the train station with the future portending poster. I turned right. Well, I did, and my handlebars did, but my front wheel decided that this would be an ideal time to investigate all the possibilities that Left had to offer. The traffic on all sides was fairly singularly adamant that right was the way to go, but my handlebars, clearly offended at my wheel's new found independence, decided to now see if going in the opposite direction was an option. I've always wanted a folding bike, but I've not wanted the bike I'm already riding to become one while I'm travelling with morning traffic. It was like Transformers, if filmed by the Children's Film Foundation.

All this happened in a matter of seconds, and was somewhat unexpected. Well, I say unexpected. I clearly wasn't paying enough attention to the sign at the train station.