“There’s no such thing as an intelligent accident”.

Blue sky, dry tarmac, under-construction road and cycle route. Been here before, only it was a differing hemisphere. That time it was a pot hole and a surveyor’s pole, this time it’s a drop curb and an access to a field. Bike and cyclist part company as the tyre glances off a minuscule drop kerb; The Navigator is sprawled at the side of the road. She knows instantly that this cycle tour of the great rivers of France is over.

Our guardian angel might initially have been absent without leave but she does turn up quickly. A car stops and the driver offers to call for an ambulance; having a local who can accurately say where we are is useful. A siren wails in the distance and I’m watching to flag them in…. of course it slides in behind me. Initial investigations commence and it soon becomes apparent that she’ll be taken off for admission to the nearest hospital. Leaving me in potential limbo, two bikes with all our travelling wealth, cards, cash, documents. There’s a tool hire business across the road, so I run over with the first bike, hoping that the blue flashing light will garner enough sympathy to find a place to leave them. I really don’t care, I’m going to be in that ambulance when it leaves.

That guardian angel is suitably chastised, and is looking now to garner back some brownie points. Which is how we collect a new life experience: to be blue-lit and two-toned to the nearest hospital for triage. It’s also how I find out that a French postcode is all numerical, as I fill out the first of many pieces of information, searching the keypad of the ambulance’s computer for the capitalised EH of a UK post code. Trivialities.

Some hours later, dosed up on morphine and Valium, pain not diminished, it’s decided that she’s to be transferred to another hospital, for a visit with their trauma team. This time by private ambulance for which the card pay terminal materialises, on the end of a disembodied arm, from out of the front seat. Different country, different system.

Hospital Two: somewhere in Lyon, (thank goodness for app. mapping). I produce the various documents and prop a counter, conversing through a narrow grill as the receptionist photocopies every single page of The Navigator’s passport. An expanded 54-page passport. Then passes out a slip of paper, the request to pay a fee. I had anticipated a charge; it just wasn’t for €6,000. Something has been lost in translation, or at least in the unusual way of writing a monetary sum. (On that previous occasion we’d been divested of 3,000,000 pesos, so this didn’t seem so bad). The pay terminal offers relief and clarification: €60.

Time starts to lose all meaning sitting in a hospital waiting area. The hands on the wall-mounted clock rotate relentlessly, yet have meaningless significance. We’re being held in a lost world under the aegis of the god Stasis.

Eventually the trauma team come and collect her, wheeled away on a gurney, clutching a drip bag of morphine to find out what will happen next. Quarter of an hour later she walks back to the waiting area under her own volition, smiling the blessed relief of pain freedom. That and lungfuls of gaseous nitrous oxide, aka laughing gas. The shoulder dislocation has been re-located. There’s also the ominous advice that the head of the humerus is fractured and might require surgery…. “when you get home”.

Our earnest endeavours to avoid air travel are being challenged for a third time. Once for a pandemic and now twice for failing body parts. It’s becoming a habit, one that, I’d rather not get accustomed to. But when illness intervenes we reach for the credit card and blow the cost, most of which won’t even be insurance recoverable. We just want to get home… quickly.

Bike boxes created out of cardboard, sourced from the local cycle shop. The owner initially asks after the rider, then with more concern, the bike. Flight tickets and taxis scheduled, we start the trek for home.

An arm in a sling is a wondrous passport for queue jumping, legitimately sitting in the pensioner’s seat and eliciting ‘club class’ concessions. Not. At the departure gate, we’re awaiting the announcement that those with children and persons who need more time to board should come forward now. It would be yet another new experience. It doesn’t happen. Were consigned to the scrum and the rammy. However we do get a sympathetic extra helping of walnut cake with the inflight sandwich and coffee.

There is an account, possibly apocryphal, of a college lecturer who charged their sports science students with finding the nations with the lowest incidence of physical exercise. The work is completed and the answer is in: The Netherlands. The lecturer suspecting this to be dubious, knowing that their nationals have a six month longevity increase over the western mean, checks their methodology. One of the questionnaires asked “do you take exercise?”, to which the majority answer had been in the negative. A ‘lost in translation’ moment, a confusion between the cycle as exercise and the cycle as transport.

So it’s no surprise that this Dutch predilection for confusing exercise and transport is also writ large at the airport. There’s 85 departure gates between arrival and departure, a 27 minute walk has been predicted, nae: mandated, (Usian Bolt did the maths), only it omits the coagulation of irate passengers at passport control and the fact that we have less than an hour to complete it. That and the further facts that we’re sat at the rear of the plane, are ten minutes late and the fire doors inexplicably close and lock on the sky-bridge, with ourselves on the wrong side. It’s a neat excuse, but we’re still one of those highly annoying passengers who have to be called, the ones you have to assume are more interested in perusing the delights of retail opportunities at the duty-free emporium. We make the flight with under a minute to spare. Seems that we might just be able to get home quickly.

We do, in no small part due to the kindness of friends… a car is waiting at the airport’s pick-up to take us home.

Picture credits: A re-located shoulder with a bit of photo’ bombing. Top right is a ‘koru’, a Māori icon representing a furled fern leaf and the message of ‘new beginnings’. Often worn by divorcees, but whose presence is fully justifiable… for it’s made of cow bone and was carved two decades ago by The Navigator in NZ.