We’re used to having things fly through the air and thwack into us while we’re out riding. You know, the usual nuisances; stones, very hard beetles, vast swarms of bees that kamakazi into you and leave your jacket and helmet oozing with furry honey. Or clouds of locusts so dense you end up covered in wing fragments and what looks like soft boiled egg. I once followed a coach down a really narrow dirt road and when I arrived white powdery dust had stuck to my Belstaff jacket and I looked as if I’d been dipped in flour ready to be fried. At the rest stop, the coach passengers all wanted to know my round Australia story. “I’ve been stuck behind your coach for 20 kilometres you turkeys.”

Then there critters we hit.

We dodge dogs, roos, and even emus. One of my girlfriends was once chased by an angry emu that seemed to thought she was competing for females and it finally succeeded in tipping her off the bike. Afterwards she painted a symbol of an emu on her tank to accompany the two painted kangaroos that also tipped her off – a record of her engagements, like a fighter pilot in WWII, but in reverse. Rider 0, Emu 1, Kangaroos 2.

While I was riding solo in Arizona’s Sonoran desert way, way out in Indian country around the back of the Cameron Trading Post, where there was nothing but bleached bones, creosote bush and cactus, a very large eagle whacked the back of my red helmet. Yes, it thought I was bleeding and wanted to finish me off. Wallop! It was quite a solid thud that sent me into a horrible wobble and made me “bird crazy” for the rest of the trip. Do you know how many eagles there are in the desert!

But even though they are scary, funny or messy, those things of nature you can understand.

What I cannot get to grips with are the people who deliberate throw things out of their car windows at me. Has that happened to you? I don’t mean the “tossers” of the Don’t Litter Australia ad campaigns who carelessly throw away lolly wrappers and soft drink cans that accidentally hit you on their way to despoiling pristine nature. I mean the people who edge up alongside, take careful aim and then fling a glass bottle or full can at you.

This has happened to me on half a dozen occasions - but never when riding with mates naturally, because, well, with Horehound by my side, God help them.

It’s not just heavy things that hurt, either. While I was waiting at traffic lights in Raymond Terrace once, a hoodlum flicked a lit cigarette butt directly at my face. My visor was open and he scored a direct hit into my helmet causing a certain amount of panic as the stinging object worked its way down into my neck roll.

Another time, at traffic lights again, a yobbo with his hat on backward threw his chewing-gum at me. When he saw how easily it stuck to my new textile jacket, he laughed, and his mates in the back wound down their windows to pelt me with PK too.

I’ve also had half a cup of milkshake hurled at me at traffic lights, and a newspaper while on the move – which of the lot was the most dangerous, because it wrapped itself round my visor and blinded me. It must have looked funny, but it wasn’t really.

Okay, the safest thing you can do when you are on your own is to keep guard up and accelerate the hell away from imbeciles like that, but why do they do it? Perhaps, since all the freeway overpasses have been fenced off they are in “brick flinging withdrawal”. I now understand how those truck drivers felt every time they saw people hanging around on an overpass.

Perhaps it’s time to fine people who throw things from vehicles. What do you think?

In the meantime, besides all the other things I watch for, I now watch for car windows gliding down, and body language within that signals I’m gonna get you with this pie!

Terri