The Germans have ways of making you walk
The moment after I stepped on the treacherously transparent black ice on the Newcastle garden path, my buttocks were on the ground and my heels in the air. I needed an 87-year-old to pull me up and get me into the waiting taxi. As the pain got more excruciating I sought to dull it with a promise to myself that became a mantra: no endless hours on a trolley. The alternative was a taxi to the airport, a wheelchair on to the plane to Hamburg, and back to Schwerin, the north-east German town where I work. By seven the following morning I was outside the accident doctor’s practice there. ‘We’re in trouble,’ my driver announced. ‘They don’t open till eight.’ He rang the doorbell just in case and a voice on the intercom told him to bring me up.