By 11am today I was beginning to wonder if the world had lost its head as I passed my third collision scene. We no longer call them accidents for good reason as this tends to imply a blameless mishap that the drivers could not possibly have avoided even on their best day. A collision however tells it like it is, two vehicles colliding due to a misjudgement, a lack of concentration, belligerent behaviour or competitive driving, often all of the above.
Most of us accept these flashpoints as the price we pay for sharing an overburdoned road network, probably because we are guilty of, or have indulged in all these elements at some time ourselves. Why then did someone like myself who has done it all, seen it all and written the book, (The Demon Road: A Theory Test Novel... incase you was wondering) still gotten wound up by what I saw at the aftermath of one of these collisions?
Picture the scene if you will, it is the hard shoulder of the M4 motorway, a middle aged man with a distant look on his face stands on the embankment while the police attend the scene. The traffic crawls past as everyone cranes for a good look at the damage. The bonnet of his super mini has been well and truely crumpled and you can well imagine what happened, it almost certainly involved tailgating and/or cutting in, so, belligerent driving + competitive driving + a misjudgement are all in the frame.
What is he thinking as he stands there? What an idiot the other driver was maybe but lets leave him out of it and take another look at our main protagonist. No, lower your eyes a bit, thats right, he has a daughter no more than seven years old and clinging to him as she cries. That distant look on him face now appears to be contrition so perhaps he is having a moment of clarity and thinking about what an idiot HE is for getting into a competative altercation when he should have ignored that inner voice and just backed off. If he had no interest in the safety of the other road users surely the presence of his own daughter should have put him in a safety frame of mind. The truth is this man has been lucky for far too long and he felt bullet proof, as it is he has been lucky this time too because he is still a dad but has he learnt his lesson for the next time? Well perhaps for a few weeks at least.
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