Scary encounter that made me fear for safety on Cork streets

Right in front of my eyes, he shot around the corner, rapid as a rocket and on the wrong side of the road, standing on the pedals of a ridiculously small bike to gain traction; he just missed smashing into an elderly pedestrian.

When I say he just missed her, I mean he literally just missed her. By a hair, a whisker. A feather.

Her angels were looking out for her that day.

He’d screeched up the wrong side of the road and raced blind along the wall and into the cul-de-sac with all the speed and power a muscular, well-fed, adolescent male could muster. Just as the old woman with her shopping bag was exiting it.

The lady froze, her face the colour of parchment.

As for me and the cyclist, I’m not sure who got the worst fright.

As I hurried over to the white-faced, trembling pensioner, the youth, sporting one of those dead- rat-on-the-top-of-my-head haircuts that they all think are the epitome of elegance, stood hesitating with one foot on the ground sheepishly, saying sorry.

“You weren’t looking where you were going - you’d have knocked her down and broken her hip!” I snapped. ”Why were you cycling on the pavement anyway?”

His expression changed and for a second there, he looked like he was going to give me a right smart back-answer.

He was, I guessed, of that tiresome generational cohort brought up to have no respect for authority or for the rights of others because his generation has rights. All the rights.

I turned my back to the sight of him and stood with the old lady; there was nowhere for her to sit down and I was afraid that she might faint. We put our bags down on the ground and she leaned against me for a moment and I risked an arm around her back.

The young cyclist apologised again from several yards away.

Ignoring him, the old lady spoke.

“I was just there visiting a friend. She’s been sick for a while,” she explained, nodding towards a small house in the cul de sac.

“I’d just walked out her front door to go to the shop when he came flying around the corner. Like that.”

There was a silence.

We looked at the lad, who was still balancing his bike, useless as a chocolate teapot, one foot on the ground. The moment seemed to stretch out.

He looked at her, flinched, looked away, looked back at her kind face again.

“Did you learn your lesson, love?” she asked gently.

His head dropped. He said he had. He said sorry again. He stood there for a bit longer. He probably wasn’t the worst of them. But I felt nothing for him but irritation. I said nothing more.

Eventually, he said sorry again, Missus, and got up on his bike and disappeared. I don’t know where he went, I wasn’t looking.

The problem, said the old lady, recovering herself and picking up her handbag, was how there were no guards around the town anymore.

“I know,” I said uselessly.

“If the guards were just around the place the way they used to be, the likes of him wouldn’t be getting away with that carry-on; nearly knocking people down,” she said.

“ I know,” I said.

“But they seem to keep the guards locked up in the station above all the time,” she said.

“You never see one around. Sure, where’s the use of that?”

No use at all, I agreed.

I asked her if she felt able now to walk the short distance to the sunny little park where there were benches. I could run across to the hotel and get her a takeaway cup of tea, maybe?

No, she said, she was alright now.

As I watched her frail but indomitable figure plod away towards the town centre, I thought about his ungraceful mien, his rough callousness, his carelessness, but also about his pressing need to stay on to ensure she was alright; I thought about the old lady’s gentleness, courtesy and courage.

Had he learned a lesson, I wondered? I hoped so.

Later, I came upon a quote from the novelist and scholar C.S, Lewis. It is thought-provoking, and even a bit hopeless, not to say terrifying for those who endeavour to make the effort:

“There is no safe investment. To love at all is to be vulnerable. Love anything and your heart will certainly be wrung and possibly be broken.

“If you want to make sure of keeping it intact, you must give your heart to no-one, not even to an animal. Wrap it carefully round with little hobbies and little luxuries; avoid all entanglements: lock it up safe in the casket or coffin of your selfishness.”

When you do that, Lewis warns, when you lock your heart away in that safe, dark, motionless and airless casket, your heart will change.

It will not be broken. of course. Instead it will become “unbreakable, impenetrable, irredeemable”.

And in the end, he says, “the only place outside heaven where you can be perfectly safe from all the dangers and perturbations of love is Hell.”