I was moaning to Davis/d(e) at Wednesday’s Coba Fynn rehearsal session about how life had been fairly mundane of late, and hence the frequency of updates here was suffering. Happily, yesterday I was knocked off my bike by a car.

I was cycling back from lunch through Pilrig Park, barrelling along the narrow path beside the primary school and which comes out at the closed end of Stanwell Street. Just at the exit from the path, the front of a car (an old, purple Fiat Panda, I remember quite clearly) emerged from behind the cover of a brick wall to the right. From then on everything happened rather rapidly.

“Uh oh,” I thought, “there’s a residential car park hidden out of sight to the right, and that’s where this car must have come from.”

“Shit,” I said.

Having never been confronted by a car with such suddenness and while travelling at such velocity, I was momentarily unsure of the usual form. I took a wild stab at it and grabbed the brakes as hard as I could, leaning right back over the back of the bike. To no avail, as it turned out; the car came to a halt just as my bike tried to occupy the same bit of space, and we parted company. Thinking back, I must have executed some kind of stuntman-style bounce off the bonnet, because I found myself on the ground, staring up at the now-stationary business end of my purple vehicular nemesis.

After a split second of shock, I picked myself up off the ground. “Fuck! That hurts like a fucker. Fuck,” I explained to the cadre of concerned ladies who lunch who had appeared from nowhere. My left elbow was distinctly painful, and I gasped in sympathy with each experimental flex. Other minor injuries seeped into the edges of my awareness: a skinned right elbow and bashed left knee, but incredibly my head had touched neither car nor ground through the whole thing. I was hopping with adrenalin.

The driver was a middle aged woman who narrated calmly through it all. “Oh dear, are you alright? I think we must have seen each other at exactly the same time. I sometimes see cyclists coming down the path but you were going so very quickly. Is your arm sore? Can you move it? Should you go to Accident & Emergency?”

I dusted myself down and stretched out my battered arm as far as it would go—I could mostly straighten it, the fingers still worked and I could rotate the wrist around. “I’m okay,” I told her. “Sorry about that. You must have been as surprised as I was.” We inspected the bike and car for damage (none apparent to either—the front wheel of the bike must have hit the front wheel of the car), promised each other we were fine and I limped off over the road to the office. I instinctively raised my left hand to wave as she drove off only to drop it, ashen faced, as a stab of pain exploded at my elbow.

After a gabbled explanation to everyone at work about what had happened, I popped a couple of ibuprofen and settled down to some one-handed typing. (Please, smirk away.) After an hour or so the ache in my arm had subsided but the elbow was swelling up and its range of movement was restricted to maybe 20° before a pain would shoot up to my shoulder. And so I spent the afternoon lurching round the office like an injured cowboy, hand grasping my belt buckle to prevent any torque on my injured elbow, and with a sort of leer of pain on my face. “Ohhhhhh,” I’d say as I levered myself off my chair with gritted teeth. “Nnng.”

Staying at Jeff & Devon’s flat that evening, Jeff fed me with a couple of beers and some more ibuprofen and I let them fight it out over my liver. Climbing into the cabin bed was interesting. But yeah, apart from that, a pretty commonplace week.