The old man is knocked out of the saddle and on to the sidelines

‘HEH, are you by any chance Persephone’s father?’ It is at moments like these we realise that the baton is being transferred from one generation to the next… Maybe Medders had been reading about the effect of fossil fuels on the environment. Maye he was harking back to the long gone days when he used to travel to school under his own steam. Or maybe he just wanted to take some healthy exercise.

Whatever the reason, Medders decided to leave The Jalopy in the garage and cycle to work. The bike bought with the vague intention of going for bracing Sunday expeditions through rolling countryside had lain idle for too long.

He dusted it off and checked the tyres. He adjusted the straps on his newly acquired helmet – newly acquired in that he had nicked it from our Eldrick’s jumble of assorted sports gear and rainwear. He put a packed lunch in the saddle bag. Then he donned his hi-viz vest (vintage 2007 National Ploughing Championships) and gave a cheery wave to his bemused wife as she watched him wobble his shaky way down the drive and out on to the public road.

First reaction of the self-propelled commuter to being on two wheels was that this was pleasant. The wind was at his back. The morning sun played through the leaves of the trees. The birds sang and the cows mooed. Friends and pure strangers alike called hello, inspiring him to push all the harder. All very pleasant indeed.

A downhill stretch tempted him into third gear. He rang his bell, just for the hell of it. He had a vision himself pedalling up the Champs Elysée with Seán Kelly and Stephen Roche.

Into fourth gear and another ring of the bell. The peak of the helmet slipped down over his eyes. Sweat trickled down cheeks glowing with the unfamiliar exertion. Fifth gear seemed a move too far but he tinkled the bell once more, this time at a man out walking with a large German shepherd.

The man seemed not to hear Medders as he puffed up behind him. But the dog responded as though convulsed by an electric shock, twisting like a demented salmon and leaping from the side of his master straight into the path of the bicycle.

There was no avoiding the collision. The luckless cyclist found himself suddenly sitting bruised and bleeding in mid-road, facing back in the direction from whence he had come.

The morning air was instantly filled with the sound of cars braking and the dog yowling. Within what seemed like a matter of seconds an impromptu committee had formed around our stricken hero, comprising the owner of the German shepherd and a selection of civic minded motorists.

‘Don’t move,’ they commanded the casualty as one while they arranged calls to health authorities and law enforcement. ‘Don’t move,’ they counselled while setting up a stop-go system to keep traffic moving past the scene of the accident. So Medders obediently continued to sit in the middle of the road facing back in the direction from whence he had come.

The man with the dog could not have been more apologetic. The garda dispatched to the scene could not have been more reassuring. The three paramedics who arrived so promptly could not have been more diligent. They hoisted our fallen hero in to the back of the ambulance and dabbed at his abrasions, checked his flexions, verified his vitals. All dabbing, checking and verifying was concluded in little more than a minute. No major injury diagnosed.

The paperwork, however, could not be completed quite as quickly. Perhaps the filling in of such a voluminous form is a roadside ruse to compel a patient to take it easy for while in the interest of their own wellbeing.

Forename. Surname. GP’s name. Address. Next of kin. The form filling was conducted by one of the crew in the back the ambulance while her two colleagues waited outside, at least until one of them worked out where he had heard this particular surname before.

‘Medders! Heh, are you by any chance Persephone’s father?’ That’s him. No longer the Pulitzer chasing journalist. No longer the canny midfielder who supplied the match winning pass in the cup final of 1981. He’s first and foremost Persephone’s father, or Eldrick’s dad. And that is how it should be.