WHEN it comes to irony, nothing can beat the fact that four-year-old Sienna Barnett’s broken leg ended up on our front page the day that the national Cycling Safety Week campaign started.

Little Sienna ended up in hospital after a cyclist riding on the pavement, allegedly without lights in the late afternoon, collided with her, knocking her to the ground and landing on top of her.

It’s slightly less interesting – but altogether more pointed– that if you look on the Child Safety Week website from summer this year.

For among the many safety reminders to children and their parents, there doesn’t appear to be one about looking both ways when you’re on a pavement.

Apart from the absence of lights – how do cyclists afford such attractive machines yet run out of money when it comes to promoting their own existence in the hours of darkness? – the continuing scourge of pedestrians are those cyclists who appear to have some abject fear of the road.

Now I can appreciate it can be no cakewalk on today’s roads – there are certainly enough drivers with similar lack of awareness to their two-wheeled counterparts – but this is getting ridiculous.

My own experiences as a driver and pedestrian suggest that quite often the cyclist’s absence of lights forces them on to the pavements where they believe they will be safer, although clearly that safety does not extend to the four-year-old with whom they might collide.

I am sure the young man involved in this incident will step forward and explain himself, thereby exploding my myth... although I won’t be holding my breath.