Bad start to the week!

There are days when everything that could go wrong does - and for me it always seems to be on a Monday morning.

Today - not only was my train 30 mins late - but when I arrived at where I park my bike - some idiot had gone and chained his to mine, becuase there were no free spaces left in the bike park.

Now in their defence, I don't think this was deliberate at all - he had tried to lock it to the stand - but it was extremely frustrating just not being able to ride off as usual.

After uttering a few expletives such as 'bother', 'darn' and 'gosh', a very kind NCP person came up to me and asked what the problem was.

When I showed him, he suggested we visited the British Transport Police to see if there was anything they could do with bolt cutters!

I was just going to leave the owner a rude note and schlep to work on the bus (a journey which I hate with a passion, but not quite as much as the Tube) - but I decided to go along with it. After all, he was being so helpful.

After visiting the BTP and registering the problem, a uniformed officer duly came along with a station person and a pair of boltcutters. He then cut through the offending bike's lock and my bike was finally free.

The police officer then took the other bike off to keep it safe in lost property.

Oh to be a fly on the wall when the owner of the bike discovers what has happened and has to waste an hour of his day (just like I did) trying to get his bike back. Plus the cost of the lock - it wasn't an expensive one - I don't think even I could have been that cruel and let them destroy a valuable lock - just one of those £8 from Halfords jobbies.

I do feel a little bit bad for them - but they should have taken more care when locking up their bike and gone to another level in the car park where there were empty parking spaces.

Something tells me they will be doing just that in the future!