April 21

My love and I are sampling the degrees of physical misery available on today's market, he with a broken collarbone and I with a mucus-laden chest. On Monday at an unspecified point somewhere on the Ingar fire trail we had our first encounter with downhill drama when Marcin hit a rock at the speed of 50 km/hr and flew through the air with the greatest of ease while several shocked spectators looked on. Rounding the corner a minute of two later at my pensioner's pace, I registered several standing bodies and one crumpled heap and went into an entirely self-interested process of elimination to ascertain whether he was amongst the standing or the fallen. And there he was, glaze-eyed and grunting and clutching at his arm in the gutter beside the track- luckily the bystanders were both less shocked and more competent than me, having no vested interests at stake, and took command and called an ambulance, rigged a sling out of a spare tube and made sure he was warm. And so to hospital- x-rays, stitches, painkillers, lights in the eyes and large scale disinfection- it was such a long process that I recovered from my shock and started to regret the sheer inconvenience of it all. As for the doctors and nurses and emergency staff: what sort of people live a life constructed out of glimpses of other people's life-changing moments, and make death and injury their daily bread? They are soldiers of sorts, living in an atmosphere of extremity and trying somehow to accept it as normality .