One of Our Wheelchairs is Missing!

 

Yesterday I had an amazing experience. I was walking through a small park in Donnington, Oxford, close to where I used to live, when I came across the weirdest thing imaginable. I felt like how the characters in the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind must have felt when they came across aeroplanes and a full-sized ship in the middle of a desert. In this case it was an equally incongruous apparition, a second generation Roma Medical Aids hospital wheelchair just sitting there in the middle of the park, right in the area marked out as a football pitch. See the photographs above and below which I took. How it got there I cannot imagine. Maybe the aliens in Steven Spielberg's classic movie and real and they scooped up the chair from one of the OxRad hospitals, maybe with a patient in it whom they abducted, and dumped the vehicle from their flying saucer along with the planes of the lost Flight 19 and SS Cotopaxi. I assume they will come back to earth in fifty years to return the patient, who will be the same age as they are now. I'm not sure which hospital it came from because there is no plate on it to identify it; unlike in my day when every chair had on it "JRH PORTERS". It has a Mitie sticker, but unfortunately the latest tin pot contractor brought in specially to trash the service is everywhere, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2021/11/the-mitie-hps.html. I made a guess that it was the JR and called the porters there. I had to go through a long and complicated maze of automated voices before I finally managed to speak to a brother porter. It was not somebody I recognized. I told him about the wheelchair and ended the call with "I used to be one of you; pride and dignity!" I do hope they come and collect the chair soon. That model is actually one of the best. It's a neat, manoeuvrable and compact front wheel steering vehicle. Note the shopping trolley style lock chain to stop them being taken by members of the public. It's an adaptation of the old Bristol Maid design, see: https://hpanwo-hpwa.blogspot.com/2023/11/acute-care-vehicles-2-second-generation.html. This is not the first time this has occurred. Back in the 2000's I once had to rescue a wheelchair from Headington Conservative Club, a good half mile from the John Radcliffe. Again, its enigmatic teleportation remains unsolved to this day.