I love motorcycles, they have been a major part of my life since I stole my first one at the age of nine. It was my only transgression, and it wasn't so much theft, as liberation, for she was unloved and I was her savoir...a crime of passion then?

Bikes became my life as I rebuilt them, rode them and raced them. I fell off and stacked up the wrecks - walking away enough times to convince myself of my own immortality. I was fast, taking many more chances than were offered. At sixteen I joined the Army and found my recklessness admired, and the greater the risk, the bigger the reward. I mistook irresponsibility and stupidity for courage. It is a young man's disease, a short-term illness.

I was into my mid-twenty's before I received the news that my standing as an immortal had been revoked. This was in the form of a high-speed collision, notice was served by way of an array of broken bones - including my pelvis and left femur, a fractured skull, punctured lung and damaged vertebrae. I spent the next week or so hanging on, as I weaved in and out of consciousness.

Most of that period is lost to me, day upon day compressed into a mere ten or fifteen minutes of awareness. I don't know if it was the pain, the drugs or my pressurized brain, but the moments of consciousness ranged from almost subliminal, detached visual awareness or an acute sense of smell and nothing more, to full-on, sliding down a razor-blade sharpness. I don't know which side of the mirror I was on, when I first met my angel, her image is as fragile as frosted breath on a window pane, but I did meet her... that much I know.

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I could feel the impact coming. I recall no images of the incident but can remember the sensation with clarity. It began with the stomach-lurching scream from every nerve. The falling of the axe... the gallows drop. It lasts but for a second, and forever - until the sickening thud explodes deep within my skull. An airburst of phosphorescence, a myriad of nerve-endings flash in a blinding microsecond, and then darkness... the unconscious void as I plummet to the bottom of a dark heavy sea.

The momentum pushes me deep, but I have some buoyancy, my last shard of luck. I rush back to the surface, lungs full of death and gasping for life. I break through a thick blanket into the sensation of light - dim light and muted sounds, from where? The very centre of my brain, they gather focus and volume, they rush in with echoes and shadow, the panic, the pain... oh the pain! I'm on fire and want death now, it beckons to me and I crave the release that it promises.

A cool slender hand appears from the mush, lays upon my brow and slowly draws across my face. I smell her floral sweetness and surrender to the soothing song of a thousand lullabies as numbness quenches the clarity, and I slip gently back into the black molasses where nothing exists.

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Whack!

Whack!

Two 10,000 volt bursts of pain detonate within my head and I'm staring wide-eyed directly at the sun. Foggy shapes eclipse the solar bursts, something is down my throat, a tendril and it's killing me. My mouth and nose are covered, I can't breathe and fight the suffocation. I choose life, I choose life! I must rip this thing from my face... A hand holds mine, calmness and serenity flows from it and I can breathe again. That gentle hand rests upon my cheek. It brushes away the tears with the panic and soothes the fire. The flowers, I can smell the...

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She comes to me again, when the fire burns, when I need her most. Tall and willowy, her hair is short and she smells like heaven. She calms me and her touch is balm. The hum of her spirit resonates within me when she's near. I'm somewhere fuzzy, not in the dark, but I cannot see. She touches my wounds, each one in turn, she cleanses, she soothes and I desperately need to see her, but my eyes are closed, welded shut. She puts a finger upon each of my eyelids, and I feel her warmth and see her light as I drift gently upon the sea. I no longer think of the depths, just look to the sky.

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The darkness has gone, the pain smoulders and I am back for good. I lie flat, immobilized with my dead legs in a contraption and listen to the surgeon. He tells me of the two pins hammered into my bone and runs through a manifest of other broken parts and their progress. He's a great man and makes me feel good... until we talk about my spine. The impact has caused a great deal of swelling within my lower back, there's some damage to the vertebrae and a disc is prolapsed. Both are repairable, but... and this is where the prognosis springs a leak. ...there is a lot of inflammation pressurizing my spinal cord and until that subsides it's not clear if I'll ever regain the use of my legs. I can't feel them, but I know they are there. My head swims with the fifty/fifty prospect of paraplegia and I want my angel.

Nobody has seen her. I've asked everybody for details of the nurse who was at the scene of the accident.

"There was no nurse, anyway you were comatose." He is the fifth person to tell me such.

"But she was there when I awoke in surgery and you were banging pins into my leg!" I plead with the surgeon… he must know her, for he was wielding the hammer as she held my hand!

"You were sedated and under general anaesthetic, you didn't wake up," his face wrapped up in a wry, disbelieving smile.

Alan, the ward orderly, has seen the lot, and says he knows her!

"Madame Morphine, that's who tended you," he smirks.

I don't believe him.

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I am asleep, yet can see her shape at the foot of my bed. She takes hold of my feet and I can feel the warm luscious oil of her soul flow through my veins. I float above a bed of fragrant petals and her hand is on my forehead, I can feel her pulse on my temple, every beat pushes me deeper and deeper into the comfort of sleep.

She came back. But that was the last time I saw my angel.

I awake to the daylight, cold scrambled egg and a tingling sensation in my feet. I tell the nurse and she kisses me. I like that, and so tell her again. She summons the doctor who scrapes the balls of my feet and watches me wince. He grins and then kisses the nurse. I'm jealous now, they are my bloody feet after all.

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I will leave the hospital and within six to eight months of physiotherapy… will make a full recovery, they say. Well not quite - but near enough.

Up until that crash, my father frequently said that I needed some sense knocked into me.

He has never recommended it since.

It took the knock of pile-driver, but then again, some nuts are tough to crack.