Adventures In Sundays

So yesterday morning at about quarter past eleven our neighbour started hammering on our door, asking in panic whether either of us were a doctor.  Figuring she probably didn't want someone to check out some data for her, we said no, and then followed her out into the street, where people were gathering to try and help out a cyclist who'd managed to throw himself head first through the windscreen of a parked Citroen just feet away from our drive.

Somehow, despite not wearing a helmet, the cyclist had only minor cuts to his head, but his jugular was millimetres away from jagged glass, so there was a woman in the car holding his head with a stack of towels and a man holding the cyclist's torso from behind.  Meanwhile, a couple of other people were stood at each end of our section of road, politely asking oncoming traffic to turn around rather than trying to pass a guy who could end up with his throat cut if so much as a strong wind showed up.

You really learn a lot about human nature when you're asking drivers if they'd mind spending two minutes driving across to the road that runs parallel to ours to get where they're going rather than risk - not by much, but risk - a guy's life by continuing on.  Turns out fully one fifth of motorists need to be beaten to death with spiked baseball bats with angry scorpions glued to them.

(In fact, our road is constantly plagued by shitty, shitty drivers, who constantly drive past at over fifty miles an hour, despite it being a thirty zone, and despite there being an A road two minutes away which would add minutes to their journey without threatening my life every time I try to pull my car out.)

This state of affairs lasted long past the paramedics arriving, but once a pair of fire engines arrived and blocked off the street, people started getting the message.  Well, most of them did; one woman decided the best course of action was to just sit there with her hazard lights on whilst she left the car to go do... something, I don't know, which then meant the next paramedic who showed up had to swerve round her on his way in.   Nice work, nameless woman! Take your place in the queue for the scorpio-bat room!

Anyway, forty minutes after the knock on the door, the cyclist had been extricated.  By that point he was standing and talking normally, extremely embarrassed about the whole thing - I think when the helicopter arrived and couldn't find anywhere to land (I'd have voted for atop that lady's abandoned car, personally, but I suppose the necessary balancing act wouldn't have been fun or easy) that he felt things had maybe become a little ridiculous.  He rode off in the ambulance, just to be on the safe side, but he seemed pretty much OK, considering the damage he'd done to the Citroen's windscreen. 

How he'd actually managed to get into that predicament in the first place remains unknown.  Were I to guess, I'd say he was swerving to avoid a driver acting like a cock.  Not often you'd lose a bet like that down here.