MR TUMBLE

I fell off my bike yesterday. In broad daylight. In front of the house. Quite spectacularly, in slow motion (or at least it felt like it). I was riding fairly slowly, coming up the ramp onto the walkway in front of our row of houses, where I have to do a quite tight U-turn, and somehow my bike stopped dead in the middle of the turn and just keeled over. I tried to grab the railings but my hand went straight through, as I continued to move forwards, so my arm got twisted, my head collided with the railings just above my right temple, my knees and shins took a bit of a battering and my already aching shoulder is now ten times worse. The bike, which landed on top of me, is OK. I blame the new wheels, naturally. There is no room for human error, not on my bike.
I was annoyed by a variety of things - I had been to the surgery to collect a repeat prescription (which was a day late), and at the same time order a duplicate sicknote for the one I'd lost. The receptionist was very snotty about it; "You lost it? Well, all I can do is ask the doctor if he would mind providing another, and it will be ready in, er, a day or so..." I almost expected a lecture on being more careful in future, and perhaps a few hundred lines to ensure it's not going to happen again. I did try to point out that had the doctor managed to sign the damn sicknote in the first place then none of this would have happened, but she was strictly old-school, and completely imperturbable.
The front wheel was jammed after the accident, but it had simply shifted slightly and wedged a brakeblock against the tyre; easily sorted this morning.
I'm (quite literally) painfully aware that my reflexes are not what they were; even if they are, I sometimes cannot perform the actions they require. Had I been able to shift my balance slightly in the opposite direction, I might have easily avoided the fall, but all I could do was sit there and feel myself go. Not a nice feeling.