Tuesday, March 17, 2009

Too much excitement for one night

God's Squad has its own blog now. If you like hairy bikers, go and visit!

In one of the posts, Sean talks about his first motor-biking accident, and it reminded me of my first - and only - motor-biking accident.

My boyfriend at the time worked in London, and I'd gone up to visit him. He met me at the station on his bike, as usual, and we set off, back through Friday evening traffic to Croydon where he was living.

Peering over his shoulder, as we drove along a four-lane highway, I saw a car in the middle of the road waiting to turn right. It was one of those time-stopped moments. My thoughts flitted rapidly from 'That car's not going to pull across in front of us, is it?' to 'It is!' to 'There's plenty of room, it'll make it,' to 'No, it won't! We're going to hit it!' to pheeeeewwwwwww as I flew through the night air and landed head-first in the middle of the road.

Being carted off to hospital in the ambulance I said, 'My legs feel wet; am I bleeding?'
'No,' the ambulanceman reassured me. 'You probably wet yourself.'
Oh, thanks.

When they'd satisfied themselves that I was bruised but not broken I was allowed to go home. Or in this case to the local YMCA where boyfriend was staying temporarily. Now this was the 70s and there were strict rules in the YMCA about not having guests to sleep over. And even stricter rules applied about having a girl in your room at any time of the day or night.

By the time we got there it was the early hours so I had to be sneaked in surreptitiously but we made it to BF's room and settled down for a good sleep after what had been a trying evening.

Two hours later the fire alarm went off.

Two problems:
a) As I said I wasn't supposed to be there;
b) I was limping so badly I couldn't have hurried out of the building if the flames had been whipping at my bottom.

BF checked it out. Nobody was moving. If it were a fire they would all get burned in their sleep. Which sounded a good enough alternative to us. The alarm stopped and we went back to sleep.

I never stayed in the YMCA again.

Incidentally, thinking about it, that bang on the head could explain a lot of things.

3 comments:

Anonymous said...

That accident was a bit nasty. Did it make you permanently nervous about motor bikes or did you just shrug it off?

Anonymous said...

ouch!! very nasty.

Liz Hinds said...

I'm 'ard,me. No, it didn't put me off.