You wait ages for an ambulance, then five come along at once

‘I need an ambulance!’ yelled the builder boyfriend into his mobile phone as the cyclist lay bleeding from a head wound.

‘What’s that, luvvie, you want to order a chicken dhansak? You mustn’t bother the emergency services with that sort of thing, dear, it’s very inconvenient and could cost lives…’

This was a sarcastic approximation of what the ambulance service operator said to the BB, which he paraphrased with much artistic licence when he relayed it to me an hour later.

I was at home when I got a text message from him to say that a couple of cyclists had trespassed on to the farm where he keeps his horses, a daily occurrence.

They come down the driveway which is clearly marked ‘footpath’ on road racing bikes and mountain bikes in such numbers and at such speed that we have been reduced to begging them to desist, for their own good if they are not bothered about us or the law. But they won’t listen.

This pair hurtled down the driveway gathering velocity until they hit a speed bump so fast that one of them flew off, bounced on the tarmac and landed upside down in the crop field.

As blood poured from his head and face, the builder boyfriend ran to help. He picked him up and helped his friend to get him off the track. But as he was limping towards the gate of his smallholding so that he could sit him down in the stable yard where he has some garden chairs, five more bikes hurtled towards them down the driveway.

The builder b screamed at them to stop but they did not stop. They whooshed through and scattered them, knocking the injured cyclist back on to the ground where he bashed himself half to bits again.