Some days have bouncers and won't let you in

Negotiating Dublin's rush hour on two wheels can be a tricky ordeal at the best of times. Your time is spent, constantly on edge, wondering is she too busy putting on make up to see me, does he look like he's about to change lanes without looking or will I fit through that gap (and if I won't does he look like somebody who would be upset if I took his wing mirror with me)?

When filtering through traffic in this manner, what I like to call "catching a bee-baw"^* is probably the finest thing that can happen. Essentially this is when some vehicle with blue flashing lights and a screeching siren zooms past, allowing you to travel unfettered in its wake as other cars, trucks and buses part like the Red Sea before it.

Of course, things don't always work out as planned - for example, a bee-baw can break read lights while I, as a rule, don't like to.

Or, you could decide to sit in behind a convoy of garda motorbikes, army land rovers and a Paddy Wagon transporting John Gilligan from Portlaoise to Dublin for a court hearing. (It would appear gardaí suffer from severe paranoia when a man on a black motorcycle, dressed all in black with a dark visor on his black crash helmet suddenly begins following their little convoy - but that's a story for another day).

There there are the days, like this morning, when you find yourself behind a garda biker in no particular hurry to get anywhere. On such occasions, the man on the bike with the blue light becomes the world's ultimate authority on where that fine line between filtering legally and riding recklessly lies.

There were 6 of us, tootling along behind him like the best behaved bikers the world has ever known.

It felt like the journey in took a month!



^* In all likelihood nobody else has or will ever call it this.