Strangers to kindness.

I have a faintly ridiculous acquaintance who becomes theatrically aghast whenever I mention my cycling mileage. If it was ever amusing, that wore off a long time ago. He will ask "but what would you do if..." questions ad nauseam, and whenever I bother to dignify his puerile questionings with a reply, it's usually "I don't know until it happens".

Occasionally, on a long ride, such questions will echo round my head, at which point I usually go "la la la la la la la la LA LA LA!" until it goes away. Most shit doesn't actually happen, so it's a waste of energy thinking about it.

This weekend, while riding a 400k audax, I got so wet and cold I had to stop, for the first time, ever. I could not physically continue. It was awful.

It happened around 10pm Saturday evening. I'd been cycling constantly (apart from food stops) since 10.30pm the previous evening. I'd also been awake the whole of Friday; at work in the morning, travelling by train in the afternoon, with 2 changes, so no chance of a kip on the train without running the risk of waking up somewhere totally inappropriate.

At around 5pm on the Saturday, it started to rain (it might have been earlier). When I say "rain", I mean rain of biblical proportions. At one point, I rode through a flooded stretch of country lane which completely covered my chainset, so well over a foot deep. However, once you're wet, you're wet, and that's usually as bad as it gets, so you carry on. I remember musing about why people moan about rain, why it has the capacity to make them thoroughly miserable. As poet Mark Gwynne-Jones says "It's Only Water".

However, at around 9:30pm, the wind, which had been around the whole time in varying strengths, picked up. The chill factor, and the fact that the sun had just set somewhere beyond those impenetrable clouds, meant the temperature dropped faster than a lemming.

I had about 50k left of my ride to complete. I decided it would be best to stick to the main road. I quickly got slower and slower as my legs started to seize. Mentally, I thought I felt fine. Suddenly, I stopped. No reason. One minute fine, one minute not.

(I'm finding this hard to write about now, maybe because the danger of my situation has finally dawned on me.)

The roundabouts on the A361 at Frome have names. From somewhere the idea came to stand at a roundabout so I could tell the emergency services my location. I became lucid again once I had someone on the phone to talk to. There was a petrol station, but it took me some time to decide to go and stand under the canopy, out of the rain. The man behind the glass ignored me completely.

A paramedic first response car turned up and he eventually got the miserable bastard in the shop to open the door and let us stand inside, but only after he'd said "This guy is hypothermic, I have to get him out of the cold or he may die." Even then, the guy begrudged us every inch of floor space.

The paramedic suggested all sorts of ways I might get out of this mess, but none of them amounted to anything:

• Local B&B - how do we find them? Tried a few from the 118 numbet, no vacancies.
• Taxi from Frome to Taunton - quote £150!
• No-one available to pick me up - told the audax organiser I wouldn't be home by midnight, but he didn't have any way of helping.
• He couldn't leave me in his control room or he'd be hanged, drawn and quartered the next day. 
• Local Police - were willing to help, but they couldn't leave me in the station alone, and it was midnight on Saturday night. They did however very kindly pick my bike up from the back of the petrol station, and keep in in the police station for me to collect the next day.

The only option we had was for him to drive me 30 miles to Bath Hospital, take me to A&E, and hope they would give me shelter. What they did give me was a Hard Time.

He pickied up 3 blankets from his office for me - the nurses took these away from me, apart from the one I refused to let go of.
They told me I wasn't ill, and that I shouldn't be there.
I asked where I should go and volunteered to go there. No suggestions.
I desperately needed hot fluids, they gave me a cup of lukewarm tea.
A student doctor examined me and said I needed food and warmth. They refused, maintaining that I was not a medical emergency.
They maintained, from 1am onwards, that they would get busy any minute (they never did) and that I would be "in the way".
They told me that my predicament was "completely self-inflicted"
They made me sleep in a chair, despite having six empty beds.
I was told to leave at 7am, whether ready or not. Trust me, I was ready.

The paramedic would have probably taken me to his house if that was the only option.

The police did what they could.

The petrol station guy would have let me die on his doorstep.

The nurses would have done the same, only it would have looked bad on them, so they tried to make me more miserable than I already was.

What has happened to human compassion? 

When I was turfed out of the hospital I phoned my friend Steve who lives quite a way away, but nearer than anyone else. He simply asked where I needed picking up from. Nothing else. Thanks, Steve.

God bless everyone I met that night, particularly the girls I met in the previous petrol station, one of whom made me a free cup of tea because the coffee machine wasn't working, and actually offered me a lift to my tent!