Phil's spill:

continuing in the biking vein, I went mountain biking on Saturday. I loaded up the bike and headed down to Glentress, just outside of Peebles, to meet up with a load of workmates. Bikes were hired, boasts were made (incredibly, Shaun could in fact ride a bike backwards), helmets were grudgingly donned and we headed off into the trees.

The first stretch was up a gently inclined, gravelly access road maybe a mile long. The sun was blazing down and I was sweating fairly freely by the time I reached the start of the trails proper with Scott, Donald and Shaun. We waited until the others caught up, then suited up in our variously borrowed and long-unused knee and shin pads to try out the skills loop, a short section intended to help newbies find their feet.

It all looked very unassuming, and I negotiated the various balance beams and elevated tracks without too much fuss.

Phil, on the other hand, did not. Coming off the ramp from the last beam, a platform maybe twenty feet long and a couple high, made up of half logs, I heard a distinct thunk sound, followed by a sustained - and I mean completely unwavering for at least a minute - wail of pain. I was so taken aback by the volume and agony evident I thought that someone must have had a minor tumble and was hamming it up for comedic effect, but I couldn't have been more wrong. Phil was prone beside the beam, gasping in pain. His front wheel had come off the side of the beam, sending him over the handlebars. He'd come down pretty much on the top of his head, and his neck had taken the full weight of his body as he did so.

We milled about in shock for a minute, and then tried to sort things out: a few of the guys kept an eye on Phil, tying to make him comfortable and making sure that he didn't move too much; Bobby rode after an ambulance we'd seen on the way up and when he missed it, we called the Hub to send for another one. Dave and I led it to the foot of the path up to the skills loop. By now about an hour had passed after the accident, a bike ranger had arrived and we'd all calmed down a bit. The rangers and the ambulance men were fairly optimistic: although Phil was in pain when he tried to move he could at least still move all of his limbs and once we got him onto the ambulance's stretcher for spinal injuries, he was much more comfortable.

Unwilling to stretcher him down to the ambulance and then negotiate the bumpy tracks back to the main road, the ambulance guys made a series of radio and phone calls and finally obtained the services of a Royal Navy Rescue helicopter, which arrived about forty-five minutes later:

Those are your tax pounds at work choppering "Extreme" Phil off to the Royal Infirmiary, getting him a mention on the news in the process.

On the up side, the rest of the day's biking was brilliant.