Week 51/2025: A nightmare of cyclical proportions
Week of 15 December 2025
As we edge closer to the solstice, I feel unsettled, edgy, and things happen that throw me right out. And they aren’t, in the grand scheme of things, that bad. There’s a lot lot worse happening in the world. A lot. But I am tired.
This post is wholly researched and written by me. I do not use AI in my writing. I will always bring you my stories in my real human voice.
A nightmare of cyclical proportions
Just walking along, keeping to myself
I must have cursed myself last week by writing about people who complain in the newspaper about e-bikes because I had my very own run-in with a bike rider on Thursday.
I was walking to work on a particularly narrow area of footpath, on the side of a multi-lane main road. This road is very busy, especially in the morning and afternoon peaks. It’s not a road I would be comfortable riding a bike on at that time of morning unless I needed to be somewhere along that road. Otherwise there’s a much hillier, but quieter back route that gets me to work.
As with other busy roads, when I walk here, I find the traffic noise uncomfortable—some days more so than others—and I usually wear either earplugs or headphones (sometimes both) to reduce the noise and keep myself calm.
This is what I was doing on Thursday morning. There’s a narrow footpath, usually with cars parked in one lane in the morning, then you get to a T-intersection, where the side street and the pedestrian crossing give you an opportunity to get past people who are slower than you.
Approaching this crossing, I became aware of an older lycra-clad man on a bike trying to get my attention.
The exact details of the conversation escape me because it all happened very quickly, but it went something along the lines of him frantically asking me did I not hear him.
I had not.
He had, in this short section of footpath before the crossing, been trying to get my attention so I would move out of his way and he could ride past me. On this narrow section of path.
As I hadn’t heard him, he’d had to stay behind me.
Having him come up behind me like this startled me. Then he launched into a tirade, most of which I don’t remember but it included comments about people wearing headphones and how “those things are a health hazard”. I was already panicked by him approaching me, and once he started at me like this, I completely lost it and started screaming at him that the noise of the traffic is a fucking health hazard and I wear headphones if I need them to keep myself calm, and he doesn’t know anything about me . . . at which point he rode off down the side street and left me there completely out of control.
A lady walking past asked if I was okay and I said yes, it was that arsehole there, and she said it’s always the cyclists isn’t it, and I kind of nodded because not all cyclists, and I took the next half hour to calm down enough to go to work.
I’m still pissed off about it.
What the hell?
As a rider, that guy must know what it’s like to have cars invade your riding space, and try to get past you in tight spots when they could wait until there’s more room. This was not a long section of path, and there was a crossing coming up where he could have easily got past. When I ride on that section, if there are people in front of me, I don’t ring my bike bell and expect them to move. I slow down and wait until I can get past them or I get off and walk the bike.
There is no need to attack pedestrians for walking on a footpath.
In fact, the Road Rules say:
250 (2) The rider of a bicycle riding on a footpath or shared path must –
- (a) keep to the left of the footpath or shared path unless it is impracticable to do so; and
- (b) give way to any pedestrian on the footpath or shared path.
* give way means the rider must slow down and, if necessary, stop to avoid a collision.
So headphones or not, I was in the right.
Doesn’t make me feel any better though. He probably went on his way and complained to anyone who’d listen about unaware pedestrians, while I complained* about inconsiderate bike riders who don’t know anything about the people they attack, and who should be a little more respectful on a shared path.
‘Shared’ being the operative word.
*After I’d calmed down enough to be able to coherently speak about it.
Headphones are not health hazards
It isn’t my fault the world is too loud for me. Yet I’m flooded daily with ads for products and apps that will overcome my “dysregulation”, suggesting there is something wrong with me that I need to fix.
I don’t think there is. My brain responds in the same way that human brains have responded over thousands of years to too much noise. The world has changed and got louder and slow-adapting brains have not adapted. Brains find a lot of noise threatening and overwhelming. It’s part of the reason I’m constantly on alert, living in the ‘red zone’ as my massage therapist put it. And because that’s where I live, it often doesn’t take much to tip me over the edge. Someone having a go at me for doing the very thing I need to keep calm will do it.
I know I can’t make the world quieter or less bright and, therefore, if I want to continue to live in it, I have to do things to reduce the input I get. The world won’t do that for me. Enter headphones and ear plugs. But I refuse to accept that there is something wrong with me because I have to do this.
That is all.
And to completely finish the week off
I was walking on Sunday morning, when I heard a bird screeching. I looked up and saw a cat running with a small bird in its mouth and the screeching bird flying behind it, highly distressed. As I suspect anyone would be if their mate or their child or their friend or whatever this poor bird in the cat’s mouth was to this flying bird.
There was nothing I could do. The cat bounded over a back fence and disappeared with the bird, leaving the distressed bird alone and me very shaken up.
I felt awful.
Habit tracker
Existing habits
- Go outside first thing (7 days): 7/7
- 15 minutes morning exercise sequence (7 days): 6/7
- Hip exercises (5 days): 1/5
- Walk (7 days): 5/7
- Carry a notebook with me when I walk (5 days): 5/5
- Thinking time (4 days): 1/4
- Mid-day journalling (7 days): 0/7
- 9.30 shutdown & dim lights (7 days): 2/6
- Evening routine (7 days): 6/7
New habits I’m trying to put in place
- Set timer for morning planning (5 days): 0/5
- Work shutdown (5 days): 0/5
- Days out of 30 I have got up at the alarm: 10/14
Summary of the week
Some positive things
It wasn’t all bad this week.
I decided not to go to the work Christmas party and I felt really respected when people didn’t try to push me into going and didn’t ask me why. They just accepted my decision to not go. I feel like a few years ago people would have been encouraging me to go when I didn’t want to and I’d have ended up going to keep them happy. It seems like there’s been something of a culture shift.
And the best till last, on Friday I found out from Open House Hobart that one of my photos had won a prize in their photo competition.
That was exciting!
This week I learned
I read that “chronic tinnitus may increase stress levels by keeping the body that much closer to a fight-or-flight response to sound”. The results of this study “suggest that people with debilitating chronic tinnitus experience heightened vigilance and react to normal, everyday sounds as though they were threats”. That doesn’t help my mental state either.
Unrelated, I read something about the movie Coraline, and the cake that the Other Mother gives Coraline. The cake has the words ‘Welcome home’ written on top, and there’s a double loop in the ‘o’ of the word ‘home’.
According to graphology, aka the analysis of patterns that occur in handwriting, a double loop on a lowercase ‘o’ means the writer is lying. The story notes that the double loop appears in the ‘o’ only in the word ‘home’, not in the word ‘welcome’, which is interpreted as meaning Coraline is welcome, but she is not really home. This appears on several internet sites. Other people reckon graphology is not actually a thing, but even if it isn’t it doesn’t really matter. This is a known symbol within a story that is, after all, fiction. (This article is one of many that discusses this theory.)
Britannica tells me that that the giant sequoia, (Sequoiadendron giganteum), a coniferous evergreen tree of the cypress family (Cupressaceae), is “the largest of all trees in bulk and the most massive non-clonal organism by volume”.
The giant sequoia is the only species of the genus Sequoiadendron and is distinct from the coast redwoods (Sequoia sempervirens), which are the tallest living trees. The trees are found in scattered groves on the western slopes of the Sierra Nevadas of California at elevations between 900 and 2,600 metres. They were once reputed as the oldest living things, but the largest stumps were examined in tree-ring studies and were found to be less than 4,000 years old (bristlecone pines are older, as are a number of clonal trees).
There are two of these trees in St Davids Park in Hobart and one of them is very sick.
This week I noticed
I noticed the giant sequoia in St David’s Park and went to investigate what was going on.
What’s making me think?
I’ve disliked Google for a while because it’s ingrained in everything, and nothing seems to be free of it. I’ve already ditched Google as a search engine because I hate its AI summary, and you might remember I ditched my Fitbit a few weeks back because I didn’t want to link it to a Google account.
However, I got even more shitty when I saw this post, which from a quick search appears to have a grain of truth to it.
A bunch of tech billionaires are forcing their vision of the world onto everyone, whether we want it or not, and it’s up to us to adjust to the disruption they are causing to make more money for themselves.
It made me determined to get rid of Google completely. It’s going to be a huge thing to do because of its presence everywhere. There will be many steps in this process, including sourcing alternatives to the many Google services I use.
Changing email will be a pain so I want to make sure I get a future-proof solution to that.
I thought I could start out by finding out which apps or services I’ve already linked my Google account to and revoking all those accesses.
This is what happened when I tried to find out.
It’s everywhere!
And yes, I know all the tech companies are intrusive and I don’t trust any of them, but Google seems like the one with the most tentacles and most hooks, so it makes sense to start there.
The best thing this week
Winning the Open House photo competition.
Reading
- The Longest Climb by Paul Pritchard
- Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
- Lady Audley’s Secret by Mary Elizabeth Braddon
Watching
- Resident Alien
- Doctor Who ‘Galaxy Four’
About The Author
