I aimed a tut at it myself as I race-walked along Cricketfield Road, unimpressed by its obstructive presence on the pavement. But that was no rebuke at all compared with the violence that would follow.
The man had already stepped into my eye line, stepping off the opposite kerb, crossing the road on foot, wearing no coat, carrying no bag, apparently proceeding with no clear or urgent purpose.
There was something odd about him, but he was moving only in my vague direction, and I kept walking, unperturbed except for a tiny fear that he might seek to engage me in a random and baffling conversation.
I had passed the parked Lime bike by the time he reached it, but only just. That is why I registered the full force of his assault on the obtrusive e-bike, one moment insolently impeding the path of blameless pedestrians, the next brutally felled by a single kick of unexpected ferocity and force.
I mean, those things aren’t light. Heaving them upright when you find them sprawled across the slabs at the end your road or piled in chaotic heaps requires a fair amount of effort and strength. Dumped motionless and upright, they aren’t that easy to move aside. But this guy, not young, not tall and not big, had levelled one with one big swing of a little leg.
It was vicious. I heard him muttering as he contemplated his motionless victim. His tone was one of mixed scorn and satisfaction, but I can only speculate about specifics: “Eat shit, agent of Uber”, perhaps; or “stitch that, micromobility menace”. Mindful of the man’s sudden and very physical venom, I hastened on towards Dalston, in any case not wanted to be late for a planned close encounter with a dentist (the e-bike in my photo is from a different unhappy London scene).
I wonder what he did next. Was his e-bike assault a one-off, or was it part of an ongoing vigilante mission that would see a trail of delinquent Limes, Dotts and Zoomos flattened by the righteous sole of whatever he was wearing on his feet?
Are e-bikes his pet hate? Judging by how he was dressed, he hadn’t travelled far, raising the possibility that he lives close by and routinely surveys the view from his window, primed to unleash an avenging wrath. Or was he simply minded to vent his rage on any object on the street he could batter to cathartic effect?
The latter seems a bit more likely. After all, the angry man’s act did not rid the pavement of Lime litter, it simply rendered it horizontal and therefore even more of a nuisance than before. There is, though, one broad conclusion to be drawn – those revved up bicycles can excite strong emotions.
John Vane is a pen name used by Dave Hill, publisher and editor of On London for fiction and sketches. Buy his London novel Frightgeist: A Tall Tale of Fearful Times here or here.