Kamikaze Cyclist Clears Haddenham Lane Like A Bowling Alley

People are jumping. Not stepping aside, not flattening politely against a wall, jumping, with shopping, at an age when nobody should be airborne outside a bouncy castle. At the top of Gibson Lane most mornings a woman in a high-vis tabard selects a pedestrian from the available stock, drops her head, and accelerates in a manner the parish council has recorded in its minutes as "seriously committed". A man went into a hedge on Tuesday and came out of it holding a different hedge. A woman cleared a wheelie bin from a standing start and has been asked by the cricket club whether she is free on Saturdays. The lane calls her the kamikaze cyclist, which is unfair to her and to the word, because the risk has never once been hers.

She does not wobble. She does not brake. She has never been seen to acknowledge gravity as a going concern. She arrives at speed, passes close enough to move a shopping bag, delivers an assessment of the pedestrian's coat that witnesses describe as cruel and broadly accurate, and is gone before anyone has got their breathing back. Everything dangerous about the arrangement is handed to people who were walking to the shop with no plans and no helmet.

The paper cannot name her, and not out of delicacy. Nobody knows who she is, which this reporter regards as the most impressive thing achieved in this parish since the drain was unblocked. The queue in the shop has stopped asking who she is and started asking when she is, which is the sort of question you only hear about trains.

That has hardened into something close to a timetable. A man on Churchway keeps a note of her by the back door and will tell you with great calm that she runs heavier on bin days and lighter the week the school is off, which is not science and is better attended to than most of it.

"I was carrying eggs and I made a decision," said Colin Thrupp, a retired surveyor who went over a low wall near the bend and landed in a flower bed.

A proposal to paint her silhouette on the road as a warning collapsed when the sign-off committee could not agree whether she was side-on or coming straight at you, which several members felt was the only way anyone had ever seen her, usually from the floor.

The council, having considered signage, having considered a mirror, and having considered doing absolutely nothing for a further year, has gone with the last of these. You cannot put up a sign saying BEWARE unless you are willing to finish the sentence, and nobody on that committee will finish the sentence in writing, in case she reads it, agrees with it, and comes back for them specifically. Until then Gibson Lane is managed by reflex, and the whole street now walks the way you walk when something is already behind you, which is a strange thing to have to learn outside your own front door.