follow your feet: The Bike (Pt II)

If my goldfish memory serves me at all, I believe that last time I updated you all on my general life status I was busy complaining about the relationship I have with my bicycle. What I really didn’t factor in was that fact that my bike has ears (and that the hills have eyes). And, correspondingly, my bike got it’s own back on me the week after I wrote that last blog…

I told you that my bicycle and I had a complicated relationship. And that, I found riding my bicycle sober difficult enough. But what I conveniently left out (because my parents read my blog too) was that riding my bicycle drunk is an activity nigh unto death. I really don’t know why they make the bike paths in this country so narrow. They’re only like 2 m wide, in some places. That’s just asking for trouble; don’t you think? So anyway, I missed the bike path and was busy biking along in the gutter on the road, when I got all tangled up in the curb and fell (ever so elegantly, as only I could) across the bike path presenting myself as a kind of road block. Which was fine. It’s not like I haven’t fallen off my bike before (sober or otherwise…). Except my babysitter was biking along behind me, making sure that no harm would come to me.

You get the general idea...

It's harder than it looks, I promise.

Now, I want you, just for a minute, to put your self in the shoes of Tom Cruise in an adrenaline filled high-speed car chase. You’re 145 minutes through your 150 minute chase and you’re trying to get rid of the guy on your tail. You pull on the hand brake and come to a skidding halt right across the road. The guy chasing you doesn’t have time to react. However, somehow, instead of crashing into the body of your car, he just skims the bonnet and does one of those amazing triple flips and sails over you (not without the necessary amount of damage, of course – a scratch or two). Also, at the same time, someone lights a match, throws it in the air. The match sets the second car on fire, there’s a big explosion (because the guy chasing you is conveniently carrying enough explosives to start WWIII). And just when you think everyone is dead, you see Tom Cruise climb out of the car ever so slowly, wincing in pain, with a few burn marks on his face. And then, because it’s only the first movie in the trilogy, you see the villain limping off into the darkness of night. Did I mention that all of this, despite happening at top speed, is proceeding in slow motion?

Exactly what happened

So that’s pretty much what happened to me. My friend biked over my arm. He went flying off into the darkness of night (he lived to tell the tale). And I sat up, not with burn marks on my face, but with a rather dislocated elbow. I’m sure it looked just as impressive in real life as it always does in the movies too. What they don’t show you in the movies though, is just how long the recovery takes. So, three weeks on, I can almost straighten my arm again. I blame The Bike, who, now, at the very least, deserves to be a proper noun.

In other news, I spent last weekend on Sweden’s west coast, at an art museum (which, if you know anything about me, tells you more than you need to know), drinking coffee, swimming in the North Sea and discovering my sprit vegetable.