💾 Archived View for freeshell.de › stories › poppins.gmi captured on 2023-06-16 at 16:32:33. Gemini links have been rewritten to link to archived content
⬅️ Previous capture (2022-03-01)
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As I woke up, I passed a clock. It said 4 o'clock. I realised that it must be 4am and I was in hospital being wheeled along a corridor on a trolley. A nurse was walking beside me but just out of view.
"What happened?" I asked.
"You fell off your bicycle."
Pause for thought...
"I didn't have a bicycle."
I could feel something in my hair. She told me it was a ribbon they'd tied my hair back with when I was being sick. They couldn't hold my hair for me because I was fighting them off. Oh my. I apologised.
She told me that she had my umbrella, and she asked me my name. She said they'd called me Mary Poppins because of the umbrella. I had stitches in my eyebrow. They took me to a bed.
The next day I felt awful. I could hardly walk to the toilet. In the mirror, my face was mess. There was blood and bruising all down one side where I'd grazed it on the road. My glasses had only one lens. The other one had popped out and the metal frame had cut my eyebrow open.
My father came to collect me from the hospital. He he seemed amused, but he said he'd also had to apologise to the nurses for me fighting them off. When we got home he took a photo of my face. Happily it's long since lost.
I spoke to one of my friends to fill in some details. I said I remembered being in the wine bar and we were all singing Queen songs. Then rest was blank. He said we'd all set off to walk to someone's house. He was pushing his bike, and I'd asked to have a ride. I'd put my umbrella across the handlebars. Oops. I rode ahead, but took a wrong turning. They called me back: "We're going this way!" I was crossing a little hump-backed bridge and I tried to turn back. He said I disappeared behind the crown of the bridge as I fell.
My friends found me lying in the gutter. There was a lot of blood running down my face. A taxi came over the bridge and nearly hit me. The driver radioed his base to call an ambulance. My friends tried to stop me touching my face. They said I was alternately moaning in pain and sitting up making jokes. They weren't allowed in the ambulance with me, but one of them called my father.
The following day I was going to see my girlfriend. My father felt so sorry for me that he drove me all the way into central London so I didn't have to catch a train.
All of this could have been avoided if I'd drunk less, or left my umbrella at home, or given it to someone to hold while I rode the bike, or if I'd not ridden the bike, or not taken the wrong turning. It took a chain reaction of stupidities put me in hospital.