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As a regular rider on two (human-powered) wheels, I'm keenly aware that I'm often a second or two away from a personal injury claim if I'm lucky enough to survive the potentially fatal accident beforehand.
To put it more simply, taking to the roads on a bike these days never feels safe - and I imagine all of you cyclists out there also sense that.
As all of us embark on our next, often perilous, cycling journey that starts just a few metres from our front door, do the same things go through your mind as they do mine? Those thoughts start with - will this be the last time I see home? Have I said farewell to the family for good? And so on.
Within a minute of leaving my home's cycle lock-up, I reach a busy main road where - there is no more apt description - I must literally take my life in my hands and, as I use pedals, also my feet.
This maybe a B-class road but the B2145 Chichester-Selsey route is an absolute nightmare. Unless it is the middle of the night, traffic is always pouring up and down this thoroughfare. Living in Hunston, the road is now typical of the sometimes over-used description, 'rat run'.
Rats driving all manner of vehicles - cars, vans, giant juggernauts, motorcycles - tear along a strip of road perhaps half a mile long that divides this rural village into two neat pieces that then adjoin the tarmac carriageway in ribbon-like fashion.
Hunston is rarely a destination for any of these rat drivers - and so they 'run' along it, like rats leaving a sinking ship. And I often think this is a fitting analogy. Selsey's sea defences are frequently in the news - it's not hard to imagine that the rats speeding up the B2145 are leaving the coastal town before mighty waves caused by global warming swallow up the whole place. Maybe the submergence of the UK will begin at Selsey.
Anyway, apologies - that was a slight digression. It is my lot to have to join the traffic-swilling chaos that is the B2145 on my bicycle.
Remembering well those days when the Green Cross Code was drilled, by public television announcements, into the heads of the entire British population, I look up and down the road, both ways, this way and that. And I have to do this a great deal most days before I can spot a safe gap in the traffic.
Finally able to venture out onto the mini-roundabout near my home, the experience reminds me of 'waiting with baited breath'. This is because the gap in the traffic is only 'just so'. With great trepidation, I have to virtually pause on the roundabout while straddling the southbound lane of traffic waiting for northbound drivers to give way, as they are legally obliged to do.
However, it will not surprise any seasoned cyclist out there that many, if not most, of these 'rat run' drivers do not give way at mini roundabouts. I'm now losing count of how many times I've said to myself, "That was a close shave."
Yes - I have now nearly been killed or seriously injured so often that I sometimes feel like I'm taunting (not tempting) fate. Words cannot describe the venom I spit as yet another motorist either fails to see me on the roundabout or, quite frankly, doesn't give a damn and races to cut me off before I get in front of him.
The law calls these 'rat runners' reckless, dangerous and careless - yet, in the years I've made this journey, I've never seen a single lawman at this spot. No policing, never. I think that's shocking. Meanwhile, 'rat run' motorists continue to sprint along this B2145 road, endangering cyclists or, in fact, any pedestrian-type creatures with legs who are not contained in a steel tin cocooning them from the reality of the outside world.
So, with a rallying cry to fellow bikers, it is time to end this evaluative piece about the dangers of cyclists with a reflection: my key piece of advice to all cyclists is to do whatever it takes to stay alive and uninjured. All the accident compensation in the world will not bring you back from a fatal crash. To simply repeat my point, "Do whatever it takes to stay alive while cycling."
