Is Cycling Safe?

I'm feeling chastened this week. Yesterday I was talking to Cycling Plus editor Rob Spedding, and we agreed that the Times 'Guide to Safe Cycling' from last Saturday sent out a slightly crazy message. Of course their campaign for safer cycling is brilliant. But having read the spread p8-9, readers' stories, it was so littered with fractured skulls and Police inaction that I wondered whether I was due for a nasty crash, having gotten away with it for years crossing London daily and a childhood and teenage years riding almost everywhere with very little parental intervention. As a student I made a big deal of commuting from Northampton to Oxford on the then part-dualised A43, before any cycle lanes appeared. I now think I was lucky to get away with it unscathed.
So is cycling safe or not? I'd just come back to feeling that it was, only to receive a reply from my MP Diane Abbott, also Shadow Public Health Minister, about the Times campaign (I'd written to her asking her views & support). Yes, of course she supports cycling; but: "I do not cycle myself. Largely because aggressive London motorists make me nervous!" I thought to myself: this confirms that Britain is still stuck in the golden age of the motor car, somewhere in the late twentieth-century, if the MP in London's most progressive, most cyclingest Borough, says this, and in an Olympic year to boot.
Later on I also reflected that Diane Abbott could lose a few pounds, and that all MPs operate on a "do as I say, not as I do" basis. She ought to be leading from the front in an Olympic year, but is she?
Two hours after that, I opened my email to find a nice note from a friend who runs a barista equipment business, Jonathan Money of Cream Supplies (any coffee inquiries, he's a mega expert-). He'd been on this site. Then he wrote: "I used to cycle a lot - but saw too many dead and maimed cyclists (2 dead cyclist friends and several maimed) so decided that living in Kabul would be safer than cycling. You are a brave man!"
Blimey!
I thought: this can't get any worse.
Then I read that the cyclist killed in collision with the Terravision airport coach on Bishopsgate last week was none other than Henry Warwick, a legend in his own life and, as the London Evening Standard put it, "one of the most experienced bike couriers in London."
This is a black day for cycling. I can't put it any other way.
Maybe this is also the tipping point for a complete change of public policy.
For now: Henry RIP, I will be riding in your name tomorrow at the vigil.