Road Safety?

I am all for concentrating and not wearing headphones (for example) but FFS, cycling is not rocket science. So long as you are paying attention and not day-dreaming you can think or sing or glance around a bit (at appropriate times).

Yeah of course, I'm just speaking from experience. I've never crashed with total focus because even if other people make mistakes I predict them. Of course if I'm on a country ride it's different.

not tempted to make a manoevre at the last minute to make a turn that you nearly missed;

Well that was my point about keeping the flow ... last minute changes to your direction might mean a taxi crashes into you. The point is, that when people get lost, they often panic and try to turn around or something. You see this a lot with cars, you see twats in London every flipping day doing U turns and 3 point turns. It's not the end of the world if you get a few 100 meters further from your destination to find a small turning to make a proper turn.

"nothing wrong with riding fast, but please don't ride as fast as you can - it's that last 10% that is likely to get you into trouble."

Agreed, I didn't really mean push yourself, but keep up speed. It means cars are less likely to overtake, or if they do they give you more space. Also if you going close to the speed limit, you can just dominate the lane. I don't have cars cutting in front of me, cos I usually ride right in the middle between oncoming traffic, i.e. take a similar line to motorbikes and overtake everyone.

The amount of times I've seen cars cut up slow cyclists is 100x more than times I've seen cars cut up confident fast cyclists.