Not funny.

The day before yesterday I was happily sitting in the garden, reading the paper, waiting for my aunt, who wanted to visit Evie, to arrive, when I heard sirens getting louder and louder. We regularly hear sirens of police cars, ambulances and what have you, passing our house. I don't know why. Well, obviously something went wrong somewhere. But I don't know why we hear them passing our house about once a week, when the first few years we lived here, we never heard them. Never. And then all of that changed. So, either for some reason suddenly things go wrong somewhere up the road, or the services provided with sirens and blue flashing lights have decided to take the scenic route to wherever they are needed. So I was sitting there, enjoying the sunshine, hearing these sirens coming closer and expecting them to pass by and fade away again, when they suddenly stopped somewhere very nearby. I went inside to go to the front of our house where I could look up and down the road if I could see anything. Honestly, I am not someone who runs to see what's happening somewhere, but this could be something serious happening to one of our neighbours. But when I went inside I could see a police car with blue flashing lights racing down the very small private road that runs along the side of our house and only leads to our garden, to the neighbour's house and to the back of a couple of other neighbouring properties. This small road, road even is too big a name for it, it's more of a track, is about 200 meters long and at the end of it someone has placed a couple of railway sleepers over a dry ditch to get onto the golfcourse that runs behind all our houses. The police car raced to the end of the track. Now, this was strange. Whatever could be going on? I went outside to our garden gates where I could see one of our neighbours standing on the main road waving her arms and I could hear other sirens coming closer. Suddenly an ambulance raced past our garden gate, closely followed by another ambulance. Our neighbour came running down the road again. She slowed down when she saw me standing there, with no doubt an astonished look on my face. 'Some...one ..is ....having ..a ....heart.. attack..', she said out of breath from all the running. 'On.. the... golf..course.... Son.. saw.. him.. ly.. ing... there.' Okay, I know I just told you that I am not someone who goes running towards every exciting thing just out of curiosity, but this proved too much of a curious happening, even for me, so I walked a couple of meters towards the ambulances where I could just see someone lying on the grass of the golfcourse and someone resuscitating him. Oh dear. That didn't look good. A couple of years ago I took a First Aid course and I remember the laughs we had trying to resuscitate a doll. But the real thing wasn't funny at all. And I also remembered we were told that resuscitation often does not have the desired effect. I went back to the house again and shortly after that the doorbell rang. My aunt. I let her in and directed her to the little seating area near the meadow. Then I went back to the house to make coffee and cut some pieces of the home made apple pie my aunt had brought with her. The ambulances were still standing at the end of the road. We enjoyed our coffee, the apple pie and looking at the horses and then I went back to the house to make us a second cup of coffee. I just saw them closing the ambulance doors, shaking some hands, talking to the police officers who were taking notes. Not in a rush at all. I guess the poor guy did not make it. And there we were, going on with our little lives, having apple pie and coffee, and at the same time someone's life had come to an abrupt ending. It left me feeling a little bit strange. Not funny at all.