Scoring (Conversational) Points

It rained here this morning, for the first time since we've been here. (Well, the first time that it wasn't night.) Proper rain, which meant I had to turn on the windscreen wipers in the car, and leave them on. (I've done a couple of swipes before, when I was up in some hills.) It wasn't ultra hard rain - I might have called it very heavy drizzle, but it was enough to make me very, very wet on the way here. (I'd been thinking about taking the mudguards off my bike, as they were never useful - I'm glad I didn't, but I still had to squeeze out my socks when I arrived at work.)

Rain here seems a bit like snow in England. When it snows, everything grinds to a halt, and the Daily Mail can moan about how dreadfully inefficient things are and look at Sweden where it snows all the time, and they do fine. And the people in charge of infrastructure say "Yes, we could spend massive amounts of money on infrastructure to ensure that on the one day every two years when it snows enough to slow down a few trains we could keep them running, but it's cheaper to let the country grind to a halt for a day or two." And, I'd add that having a random selection of trains canceled makes life a little more exciting, sometimes. (Or at least makes something to blog about - if you've got one.) Things are like that here, except for rain. I mean, why build things like drains that can cope with rain, when 99.5% of the time, they are going to sit there and do nothing (except look like someone wasted a lot of money on them). Better to let a few sections of road and bike path turn into small rivers, so that people on their bikes can get wet feet.

To return to the actual subject of this post, there are usually quite a lot of other cyclists around when I ride to work. Lots of people on posh, shiny racing bikes, wearing all the skin tight stuff. Some people pottering about on beach cruisers, a couple of people on recumbents (I think it's always the same two people), and some people on hired bikes and recumbents (the hire-able recumbents look really cool, but are actually very slow, with a single speed, and heavy). At the traffic lights, you pull up to the other cyclists, and can chat. You can only chat very briefly, because you're out of breath, and the lights are about to go green - so you get a sentence, or two if you're lucky, each.

The first person to speak gets to say something witty. And then the other person has no time to think of a suitably witty response. For example, if there's a strong headwind, the first cyclist might say "It will better going home this afternoon, won't it?" and then the second cyclist can just say "yes". There's no time to think of a better response. The conversation ends there. In this situation, the first cyclist wins a conversational point. If the first cyclist says "Windy today", the second cyclist can say"yes, but it will be better going home", in which case the second cyclist gets a point. (Maybe in the first case the second cyclist can say "As long as it doesn't change direction", and then both can have a point.)

If it's a nice day, then the first cyclist might say "nice day for a ride", the second cyclist can just say "yes", and no one gets a point.

So today, as it was raining, I was immediately going to say "Weather like this shows you who the true cyclists are, eh?" The second cyclist would have no time to think of any kind of witty retort, would be forced to say "Yes", and I would get a point. But, it was raining. And there were no other cyclists, either at the traffic lights, or anywhere else. So I never scored a conversational point - but I'll save it for next time.