It's 8.34am, Wednesday morning. I've heard the phrase "for FUCK's sake" three times since I've left the house and it's only been ten minutes, five of which were spent outside a nursery. My blood pressure, if checked, would measure at the length of a late-Noughties Wi-Fi password. I am cycling in London on day three of the Tube strike.
Most of my route to the New Statesman offices trickles along a "Cycle Superhighway" - TfL's hyperbolic name for bike lanes painted teal that seem to come pre-cratered, like a distressed pair of jeans. On strike days, this lane acts like the reverse of a travelator, so busy that you end up backpedalling most of the journey to avoid slamming into the Santander tractor in front of you, or the lorry - forever, and always - stationary in the middle of the cycle lane attempting to turn left.
Gears crunch and crackle on hitherto neglected bicycles. Toddlers on bike seats inhale a public inquiry-worthy percentage of particulates. Men slalom through the trundling masses on Segway hoverboards. Some, absurdly, scoot. But lowest in the hierarchy on days like today are the Lime bikes.
Lime bikers aren't just amateur cyclists, they're anarchists. The rules of the road don't seem to apply to them. Taking risks as they race against an app racking up the charge, they jump lights, oscillate between the pavement and the wrong side of the road, and cycle both too fast and too slow. For mugs like me on pushbikes, it's tricky to judge their pace: they accelerate fast then suddenly cruise at their legally capped speed, sailing along the right-hand side of the cycle lane so no one can overtake.
At one point in my journey, I am coasting in a queue of pushbikes on the left side of the path while a line of Lime bikes clog up the right - clueless riders randomly drifting into the middle so no one can pass. A shouting match begins between both sides. This is it. The frontline of our modern condition. The disruptors versus the rules-based order. The globalists versus the localists. The (literal) accelerationists versus the one-last-pushers. Citizens of nowhere versus citizens of the left-hand-bloody-side-of the road. For FUCK's sake.
Lime bikes are the unwanted gentrifiers of cycling, suddenly descending on bike lanes where everyone was once whirring along together in comradely enmity of motorists and the occasional reckless Mamil (middle-aged man in lycra). Now there are these people paying 15p per minute not to secrete a solitary droplet of sweat. A carafe of Gewürztraminer down, an abortive beanie where their helmet should be and a Kettle's Yard tote dangling from one shoulder, they are all in the way.
It is a bit of a grumpy old cliché to complain about these things, and I have myself been known to Lime in my time. But they do make navigating the city a misery. They are street junk you have to dodge, clustered everywhere you look - like great green motionless pigeons. Almost every time I walk down my own street, which is around the corner from a Central Line station (a honeypot for ebike rentals), I have to steer my daughter's buggy into the road to get past Lime bikes parked across the pavement. I always think how unsafe this would be if you were blind, and impossible if you were in a wheelchair. They're dangerous for the riders, too. Striking reporting by Londoncentric in January uncovered how often people riding them break their legs.
Lime bikes are yet another infuriating - and highly visible - symbol of our impotent lawmakers. Like me on my little manual bike, regulation trails behind the whoosh of innovation and click-click-click of runaway capital. Why are there hunks of heavy machinery all over the place that anyone can dump and no one running this city seems able to control? Isn't this ludicrous, when it takes months to approve a drop kerb, and you can get fined 50 grand for fly-tipping?
After 23 minutes of braking and sighing, I make it into the office, realising as I lock up that I have a slow puncture. Probably should've Limed it. Watch out for me on your journey home, suckers.