Re: [RC] completely healthy, stop kiddin' yourself - Richard ALLEN
On 18 Feb 2009, at 14:12, Chastain, Shannon L. wrote:
My favorite Uncle was a surgeon at St Anthony’s hospital in Denver, Colorado he told me to never get on a motorcycle!
In emergency rooms in the UK bikers are often referred to as 'organ donors'. But here's a story.
We had a friend, Hilary, who was born and brought up in apartheid South Africa. She rode around on a motorbike from the moment she could, and then her fiance had an old Matchless. As students they joined the resistance movement, blew up some electricity pylons, were betrayed to BOSS and had to get out quick, so they jumped on that Matchless and rode through the night, crossed the border, kicked their heels for a month or two until they could get a passage to the UK.
She became a noted and influential academic. Rode motorbikes until financial security meant she could put the kids in a car.?
A few years ago she was standing in a sunny field here in France admiring a friend's horses. The horses turned and cantered across to them, and one of those horses cantered straight over Hilary, shattering her leg in several places.?
Hilary, all 5'0" of her, wasn't scared of anything, and she loved horses and didn't want to be scared of them, so once her leg had been welded back together she used to come over to our place to hack out on our gentlest horse to get her confidence back. In truth she wasn't much of a rider but that wasn't the point.
In the meantime I got hold of my first bike, a big old CJ 750. For bike bores that means a Chinese version of the wartime BMW. For film bores, that means the bikes that chased Steve McQueen in "The Great Escape". I rode it around the fields quite a bit, too scared to go on the roads (and a bit embarrassed, too - as someone said, there are old people in the village here who, the last time they saw a bike like that, it had a German soldier on it...) One day I told Hilary that I was a bit timid about the whole thing. She replied that in all her years of biking, including, let's remember, a life-or-death no-headlights flight from South African state torturers, she had never experienced any kind of incident riding bikes. She said that she'd got to a stage in her life when she thought that, bearing in mind the usual caveats about trying not to hurt other people, you should do everything you want to do because the alternative is that you'll die without having done it. "You can't live your life by 'what if..'", she said.
A few weeks after this she was in a group lesson for beginners at a local riding school. The class was instructed to slow from trot to walk. Something happened - no-one really knows what - and Hil hit the ground, so gently the class didn't even stop at first, assuming she'd jump back up and remount. Life support was switched off four days later.
I'm not sure what that story has to do with anything but its raining here so I thought I'd share.
?"The Song Remembers When", by Hilary Claire; pub. Double Storey.
