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Public service announcement: get panniers!
I was always told that it was unwise to cycle with things hanging from my handlebars; but I did it anyway because I never got round to buying panniers.
Last night, on the way to![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
ewx's house to watch the Olympic Opening Ceremony (my new house, whilst rapidly converging on awesomeness in all ways, has two TV aerials the wires from neither of which can actually reach the telly), I discovered the full extent of the problem. I had a bottle of white wine in a canvas bag; the top of a bottle of white wine, you will recall, is smoothly wedge-shaped. This wedge was pointing towards the front of the bike.
So when the bag got caught between the forks and the wheel, the bottle was drawn in; glass is solid and spokes are basically wire, so it bent a spoke of the wheel. This broke the screw-cap on the bottle enough to let some of the wine out (the glass was undamaged), and bent the wheel into a pretzel shape enough to make the bike unridable; the bike stopped abruptly. Thankfully this happened just near my house, at traffic lights so I wasn't going at any speed and I didn't fall off, and even more thankfully Ian happened to be passing and wheeled the bike back to mine while I headed off carrying the wine-bottle in its damaged bag. The ceremony was really very spectacular, but is better-covered elsewhere.
De-pretzeling the wheel fortunately didn't require a new rim, so cost £12 at the Arbury Court bike shop. But I did take the opportunity to buy some nice large panniers; £25 for ones big enough to hold one and a half Sainsbury's-bags on each side.
It's so much easier to cycle back from Sainsbury's with your shopping in panniers than with it hanging in plastic bags from the handlebars!
Last night, on the way to
ewx's house to watch the Olympic Opening Ceremony (my new house, whilst rapidly converging on awesomeness in all ways, has two TV aerials the wires from neither of which can actually reach the telly), I discovered the full extent of the problem. I had a bottle of white wine in a canvas bag; the top of a bottle of white wine, you will recall, is smoothly wedge-shaped. This wedge was pointing towards the front of the bike.So when the bag got caught between the forks and the wheel, the bottle was drawn in; glass is solid and spokes are basically wire, so it bent a spoke of the wheel. This broke the screw-cap on the bottle enough to let some of the wine out (the glass was undamaged), and bent the wheel into a pretzel shape enough to make the bike unridable; the bike stopped abruptly. Thankfully this happened just near my house, at traffic lights so I wasn't going at any speed and I didn't fall off, and even more thankfully Ian happened to be passing and wheeled the bike back to mine while I headed off carrying the wine-bottle in its damaged bag. The ceremony was really very spectacular, but is better-covered elsewhere.
De-pretzeling the wheel fortunately didn't require a new rim, so cost £12 at the Arbury Court bike shop. But I did take the opportunity to buy some nice large panniers; £25 for ones big enough to hold one and a half Sainsbury's-bags on each side.
It's so much easier to cycle back from Sainsbury's with your shopping in panniers than with it hanging in plastic bags from the handlebars!
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Something like this happened to a colleague back in Cardiff. He went over the handlebars, came down on his hands and broke both wrists.
So yes - panniers are good!
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(I did this with a bottle of lemon vodka years ago - only it smashed and I cut my hands up on it. D'oh.)
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