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There’s a junction I really don’t like taking on the drive into Hitchin. It’s hard to see what’s coming from the right: you have to sort of look round behind you, up a slope and there’s quite a tight bend so you can’t see too far. Sometimes the sun shines in your eyes and it’s hard to be totally sure there’s nothing there.
Every time I get there I look extra hard, but then feel the need to take the plunge and drive into lane and hope for the best. And though it’s always worked out so far (because of my excessive caution) I wonder if one day in the future the junction will catch me out. No one knows which hill they will die on. But I reckon there’s a one in a thousand chance it’s this one.
This evening I got on to the Hitchin road with no problems, but thoughts of future accidents in my mind and then a few dozen metres later there were police signs on the bending road and then a policeman waving me through some traffic cones, passed a land-rover, on the side of the road with a big dent in its front wheel arch. And then as I drove through I saw a car in a field beside the road, turned over on its side, with its underbelly on display. I was shocked by the recent violent force, even if now everything was still. I gasped and wondered how the person or people who had been knocked rolling off the road had coped. Somehow seeing a car from this angle made it look ancient, like it’d been there for years and covered in dust and grime. But of course no one cleans the underside of their car. I don’t really ever clean the visible bit. It’s fucking filthy after all this time with no rain.
So tight on thoughts of future accidents this vision felt almost prophetic. Except I think these thoughts all the time, so by the law of averages I’ve got to get it right some time. A persistently pessimistic clock is right two times a year.
The police seemed cheerful as they waved me through, so maybe that meant no one had been hurt. Or maybe the police so much injury and damage that they can’t be arsed to pretend that they care. But bless them anyway, for standing so calmly around blind corners in both directions.
They were still there on my return some half an hour or so later. The felled car less of a shock this time, of course, but no less unsettling. I would guess the car in the field and been taken out by the other car, possibly through no fault of the unlucky driver. It looked the same as it had done before, which lessened the feeling that I had just chanced on the scene of the accident seconds after it had happened and (that tell-tale fucking phrase) it could have been me (obviously it had happened a good few minutes previously as the police were there, set up and presumably the ambulance had already been and gone.
But making everything about oneself, as so many of us do (and this whole blog lends testament to), it was another reminder of how quickly your life can turn or end without any real warning.
Hopefully it just looked much worse than it was.
