That first frost of Winter

As I write this, it�s November 19th; a date that is etched into my memory as the anniversary of my only significant car accident. It was back in 1986 or 87, I think. I was very young, very poor, and (if I�m honest) very stupid. I was also a typical Yorkshireman - tight-fistedly eking out the last traces of tread from my tires, getting that last few hundred miles, until you could all but see your reflection in them It was a long time ago, but I still remember it well. It was the first real frost of that winter, and it was a particularly sharp one. I remember the long straight road bordered by Christmas-tree decoration grass. I remember the GhostMobile Mk II�s inexplicable urge to slew sideways and mount the verge, and then the sudden drop of the bonnet as it dipped into a ditch. Here, the slow-motion stuff began. Silver grass, cloudless sky, silver grass, cloudless sky, silver grass. Ah, a cloud this time. Just a tiny one, no bigger than a man�s hand, and in the shape of a Volkswagen Beetle. I had all the time in the world to consider the cloud as the GhostMobile continued its graceful, end-over-end ballet.

The subsequent ambulance ride took place in a haphazard, dream-like blur. The sirens wailed like tormented demons, the blue lights flashed, reflecting back from every window, and the rush hour traffic parted in front of us like the waters of the Red Sea before Moses.

�I�ve only pulled a muscle in my neck,� I told the paramedic, tapping where the stiffness was worst.

The risk of whiplash clearly played on his mind, and so he secured a spongy brace beneath my chin. �That first frost of winter gets �em all,� he said, nodding wisely. He�d seen it all before.

The pace barely eased as we turned into the hospital grounds. My memory is of squealing tires complaining bitterly at the blatant disregard for their health, but in reality I�m pretty sure ambulances don�t do that. We jerked to a full stop and the rear doors were flung open by a waiting nurse. Whereupon a flurry of urgent activity found me removed from the ambulance, and wheeled hurriedly through into the building proper. Here, my trolley was taken by two porters who hurried with it down a short corridor and into a long white room with green curtains on either side.

�Quick! Put him in number three,� the nurse urged the porters (she may not have said �Quick!�), and I was wheeled through a pair of green curtains into a small anteroom. In contrast to the urgency of the ambulance journey, I was left here alone for almost twenty minutes.

Eventually, a weary looking young man with a white coat and clipboard pushed in through the curtains and took my personal details. I told him that I�d probably just pulled a muscle in my neck, and he left me alone for a further ten minutes, before I was visited by another weary looking young man with a clipboard and a stethoscope.

�Right then. Mr. . ,� he examined the clipboard and stifled a yawn. �Mr. OfClayton.� For a reason known only to himself, the man, who I took to be a doctor, prodded me in the leg with a pencil thoughtfully, and wrote something on the clipboard. �Right then. Your neck. You say you�ve pulled a muscle?�

I nodded . . . quite gingerly.

The doctor prodded the other leg, wrote something else, and then started sliding his fingers into my hair, parting it here and there. �Right then. Did you bang your head at all?�

I shrugged vaguely, no memory of whether I had or not. Had it all happened so quickly after all?

�Right then,� the doctor said shining a light into my eye. �We�ll not worry about that for the moment. Let�s get you down to X-ray.� A porter wheeled my trolley upstairs to Radiography where I was pushed into a random crush of other trolleys. More waiting. The featureless, off-white ceiling was all I was able to look at as I lay there. I tried in vain to ease my aching neck around, attempting to catch a glimpse of the motley collection of unfortunates patiently waiting their turns. One of them sighed. I didn�t know which. With nothing else to occupy itself, my mind�s eye projected the morning�s events onto the ceiling for the nth time.

The ceiling projection caught up with reality just as the porters wheeled me back to be X-rayed a second time, and then I was wheeled back into the random crush, and at last back through the endless corridors which returned me to what might have been the place I started out in. The hospital was busy now, buzzing and throbbing with the injured and the overworked. How fortunate I was that the first frost of winter had claimed me as its victim before the rush hour took hold in earnest. The early bird with a stiff neck catches the hospital trolley, while the later and more seriously injured birds, caught only chairs and benches. All of a sudden, I was a high priority case. �Get him treated and get him off that trolley�.

The doctor met me behind the green curtains, hurriedly thrusting an X-ray in front of my face, and withdrawing before I could get a curiosity-sating look at my own bones. �Right then, nothing serious here, you�ve probably just pulled a muscle in your neck. Here you are. Keep this on your person until tomorrow, and you can go now if you like.� He handed me a typed and much photocopied letter, and was gone.

I thrust the letter into my pocket, and then went in search of my jacket, which I hadn�t seen since I was admitted. I eventually found it screwed into a tight ball beneath a trolley in the adjoining cubicle, where the unfortunate victim of a nasty road accident groaned helplessly at me as I retrieved it, and then I searched the labyrinthine building for an exit.

As I walked down the hospital steps, I read the note. The bearer, it explained, had received a blow to the head and under no circumstances should that person be left alone during the next twenty-four hours. Hmmm. . .

Anyway, I lived to see another day, though my neck has been intermittently dodgy ever since. Coincidentally, there was ice on the windscreen of the GhostMobile this morning.