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Irony narrowly averted

March 3rd, 2021 · Posted by Skuds in Life · No Comments · Life

I went for a walk today, which is quite a big deal for me because I haven’t been able to really appreciate a long walk for ages until the last few days. Its all to do with Raynaud’s phenomenon, which makes my fingers go white when its cold. Oh, and paradoxically they go numb and also hurt like hell. It feels like what I imagine frostbite to be like. I have tried woolly mittens, leather gloves, compression gloves, motorbike gloves and those handwarmer things and nothing really helps. I don’t think there is anything that can be done about it, apart from winning the lottery and retiring to somewhere tropical.

Anyway, the point is that the weather is warming up a bit so I can go out for decent long walks now. During last summer I was doing 10,000+ steps every day for about three months without any gaps and I have been missing that. I like to put on a podcast to listen to while I walk. Its the best way to listen to podcasts.

Today I was making a start on the backlog that built up during my hibernation. It was about an hour long but finished while I was still on the way back. I was close enough to home to make it not worth starting another podcast so I listened to some music. Rather than decide what to play I just went to one of those Spotify daily mixes and whacked the volume up a bit.

With the music loud and ANC turned on I make an effort to pay a lot more attention when I cross roads. I make a point to stop and look properly in all directions. Twice. Unfortunately the junction closest to home is a real bastard. It has an extreme blind bend in it that makes it quite hairy to drive on and even worse to ride on. You really need to be careful driving round that bend so, of course, most people are not. They take it far too quickly.

I stopped. Had a good look. But by the time I was two steps into the road there was a car coming round from the right. I saw it just in time and stopped, but it was a close thing because I was only doing the stop and look bits of the Green Cross Code, and not the listen bit.

And the ironic aspect? Well had I not clocked the movement of the car in the corner of my eye I could well have been run over while listening to an extremely appropriate song, because at the precise time Spotify had chosen for me Aztec Camera’s classic… “Oblivious”.

Maybe it is about time I make a compromise and turn off ANC and turn on ‘hear through’ on the earphones?

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