Its been raining all summer. On and off. In that annoying way. And the rule is (yes, I have one rule, just one) that if its pissing down in the mornings I don’t take my bike to the station, I walk. If the bike’s there in the evening and its raining, I ride. Because I don’t mind getting wet. I just hate being in wet soggy clothes all fucking day. And I don’t do ‘protective out garments’ because you look like a paedophile.

Such was yesterday. Arrived at the station to find it brilliantly sunny and yet raining quite heavily. Ok, that’s rule 7, we ride home. And as I peddled my way home I started to do some calculations to explain a rather strange phenomenon.

That if I cycle in the rain (about 5 minutes of biking) I appear to get 38 times wetter than if I walk, which takes about 15 minutes. Surely, assuming constant rainfall (we must consider all variables here, this is frikkin scientific, innit?) I would encounter exactly the same number of raindrops in either situation, just encounter them 3 times more quickly on the bike. Its not like I walk between the raindrops. And cycling between raindrops would be strange verging on extremely dangerous. I have tried that. And got breathalised by a confused and concerned policeman.

So I performed some preliminary calculations to ascertain where the errant factor of 38 comes from and arrived at the rather elegant and scientifically valid conclusion that ‘God fucking hates cyclists’.

I need to think of other things. Like migrants. I’m still torn. I have a devil on one shoulder (we’ll call that demon ‘David Cameron’) telling me that we don’t want these pathetic, homeless, stateless, burdens on the economy in our midst and we won’t let them in to abuse our welfare state. And I have an angel on the other (Angel Merkel, in fact) telling me that Syrians, in particular, and everyone else there, are desperate refugees from civil war, from IS, from horror and death and should be welcomed to Europe from a humanitarian standpoint.

The problem is that the entire middle east and half of sub-Saharan Africa can’t all come here; there’s not the room nor the finances to support them. Though I’m not unhappy for them all to go to Germany. That way, as part of ‘Europe’ I’m being a humanitarian by proxy but don’t have to put up with all that inconvenience of having them here.

Does that make me a bad person?

Yours badly,

A xxxx