High Speed Dirt!

High speed dirt was originally a phrase that meant parachutists who's shutes failed to open and had a rather unfortunately coming together with the ground.

But on Sunday it came to mean the boy and the scooter. The boy had a micro scooter for Christmas but its only in the last couple of months he's really come to grips with it and now he zooms along like something George Lucas has improbably computer animated in his latest abuse of the Star Wars franchise. He weaves in and out of people at such a rate and I have to have my trainers on to have half a chance of keeping up with him at full pelt.

He'd not had a proper off on it and you can probably see where this is heading already. It doesn't end well. A few streets down there are some large trees with roots that have damaged the pavement. When the high velocity scooterist hit one of these, the front wheel stopped dead, the rest of him carried on and the momentum carried him head first into the pavement. E equal M C squared and all that.

I have to say, in the past we've had odd looks from other parents as our lad has gently pottered around with a full cycle helmet on while their offspring don't but as of this moment I have never been so glad of it. The brim of the helmet took most of the imact and "all" M'laddo had was a slight grazed chin and a terrible nose bleed. The nose bleed was bad enough that it tricked down the back of his throat and out his mouth and initially I thought he'd cut his mouth badly too. It took him a little while to start wailing- the pain was probably above the recognition threshold. But he did.

I scooped him up, unmindful of the blood running down my top and ran back home with him, his helmet and his scooter in tow. The wailing continued.

The wailing continued as we cleaned him up and tried to stem the nose bleed. In fact it only stopped when the failsafe measure of an ice lolly was proffered. He's a tough little bugger.