I looked up the hill and there it was. The bus 70. A comfortable, warm lift directly to the office.
The bus was one hundred meters behind me and the bus stop 200 meters in front of me. The race was on. Man versus Machine.
As I sprinted round the corner, I saw a shortcut through an even patch of snow that I calculated would be the difference between success and failure. I was right. The snow turned out to be two feet deep and slowed me down considerably.
One big jump to get out of the snow drift and back on to the hard compact ice of the pavement… One toe clipping a big block of ice and I’m now horizontal with the cold ground rapidly approaching.
As I lay star-shaped on the ice-gravel mix that has come to pass as a pavement in Stockholm over the last few months, I heard bystanders wince, small children laugh and the bus engine gently passing by…
