# miles this month - 23
# miles so far this week - 13
# miles last week - 67
£ in kitty for Darmstadt - 35.00

Woo HOo! The Darmstadt fund is growing. I guess the £11 cab fair I saved to the bus station this morning helped a lot :-) Still got a long way to ride until I reach the £180 target though!

Anyway, following on from last weeks post about the paparazzi getting me, I had one of those rides home this evening where I was being snapped by more people than usual. It's normally a dead give away when you hear a car come up behind you, but it won't overtake, even though there's enough room, and then when it does finally go past, there is a passenger pointing their mobile phone at me. Well, there were about half a dozen of these bad driver types this evening, and one guy with a decent camera taking photos of people reading the new free London newspaper that had an oppopportunist shot or two.

But the interesting one tonight was the police car on Clerkenwell Road. It was one of those events where they went past me, got stopped at the lights, I caught up, they came up behind me, I over took a bus, they held back, I pulled in, they went past, I looked, passenger was holding a digital camera, type of affairs. Fairly typical, except that it's never happened with a fully kitted out cop car before. Then, they got stopped at the lights just before Old Street tube station. As I went past, the passenger took a couple more shots, so, I did the only thing I could think of at the time... I grinned and waved! All ok so far. Except that I was now approaching a red light, and it's one of those where there's no convenient lamp post to hold on to, so I never normally stop. The side streets that cross the main road hardly have much traffic, so there's never a need to stop. This time, however, I've got 2 coppers with a camera, and my photo, sitting right behind me. Do I risk an obvious illegal maneuver or do I risk trying to idle, with an audience, where I know I'll fail and make an arse of myself?

Yup, you guessed it... I went for it. And due to the timing of the next lights, my sprinting abilities, the density of traffic, the the combination of directions we each could have taken... I didn't see the coppers again. But it makes me wonder... am I now a marked man?