Karma Zombie

Just like bloody buses: you equate one numb-nut to a zombie, and before you know it, a hoard of blank-eyed, cold-blooded, corpse-lookalikes jump in their cars to hunt you down and claim today's prize.

Three minutes into this morning's cycle ride and a zombie in a silver 4x4 nearly clips me at about 45mph in a 30mph zone while under-taking a row of cars going over a bridge, just so he could get three cars in front of them. Five minutes later, and I arrive at the scene of an accident on a narrow country road . Some zombie has hit a car at a T-junction and is standing looking at the considerable damage to his 4x4 currently parked in a hedge and minus its front. Luckily, apart from shock, no-one seems seriously injured and there doesn't appear any need to demonstrate my first-aid skills, so I continue on my ride thinking that the locals may be over-doing with the road kill zombie bait and also considering the karma of existence. Not that I'd have felt inclined to attend to the bulky zombie scratching his brain-dead head and fretting at the bent wheels. Oh, did I mention the crash-test zombie's car was silver? And a 4x4? And bore a remarkable similarity to the one recklessly driven past me only minutes before?

But karma is karma and I must be repaid for my sin of omission in not stopping to double-check that everyone is okay.

Less than fifteen minutes later and I am reaching the brow of short, sharp hill (there are some in Suffolk) on yet another narrow country lane. At the very moment I spot a couple of the regular fleet of cars I see each morning coming towards me, I hear a squeal of brakes right behind me. Some other zombie, in another silver 4x4 is returning home and considers that, since the national speed limit is 60mph, it is okay for him to attempt to maintain that speed while pulling out to overtake a cyclist on a blind bend.

But karma is karma: you keep putting out bait for zombies, as someone obviously is around these parts from the evidence of another half-dozen newly dead rats splashed on the tarmac, and they'll turn up.

Though not always, because later ...

I do a track-stand at a set of crossroads, as the old couple in the car behind me, the young guy in the van trying to pull out, and me, watch a suicidal mouse run out and investigate the piece of road we are all trying to inhabit, before deciding the adjacent fields are more attractive. No-one seemed particularly bothered we had been held up.

I could nearly hear the birds sing.

Instead, all I heard was the sound of snuffling sows fighting over some morsel.

Have a great weekend and try not to do the stupid things stupid zombies do.