Riding a recumbent bike through London I’m obviously somewhat aware that I’m sitting rather lower down than the average cyclist. On the whole this doesn’t bother me: London drivers, on the whole, are a pretty polite lot and seem to give me plenty of space. However, now that the clocks have gone back and the evenings are pitch black My thoughts turn to making myself as visible as possible. 

Interestingly the rear light on the recumbent is actually at pretty much the same height as on any standard bike, but with the idea of fitting a light as high up as possible I dropped in to my local bike shop with the idea of getting a light on the back of my helmet. I was somewhat taken aback to find that such a thing is hard to come by. I’m sure there are manufacturers out there who do such a thing, but the captital’s biggest chain of bike stores apparently don’t sell it, whatever it is. 

Fortunately one of their staff was a bit more of a lateral thinker than some and suggested that Cateye’s SL110 loop light may well fit the bill: 

Cateye rear loop light

It isn’t obvious from the picture, but that thing that looks like a piece of string is actually elastic so you can loop it through a vent in the back of your helmet.

I’m of the opinion that you can never have too many lights on a bike, though someone I recently read of who claimed to have 40 LED lights on his bike was perhaps a little extreme, so although I can’t afford to buy up the whole shop I may well have a look around to see where else I can fit a neat little light like this. I may have to buy a whole raft of CR2032 batteries to keep them going, of course, but since all sorts of devices now use these slim line batteries I’ll have plenty of use for them.