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Who says life in the countryside is dull? OK, it’s taken pretty much two years of living here for anything to happen, but now BANG, the village is going to be abuzz.
And for the third time in two years gas has done its best to try and kill me and my family. What did I ever do to gas? I mean I converted some of it into a different gas, but I thought I was helping. And I’ve produced a fair deal of it too, which again, you’re welcome gas. Stop trying to kill me, I am on your side.
Today’s blog was going to be about going to see a fun version of “The Tiger Who Came To Tea” at Hertford Theatre and admiring the efforts of the cast and writer to stretch that short story out to 55 minutes (I thought the additional wordless scene where [spoilers] they drove to the restaurant when they’d run out of food [they walk in the book] might actually be squeezed out to fifteen minutes by itself) and my observation that the Tiger is a bit of a rude cunt and my favourite thing about the book (and now the play) that they buy some tiger food (and it’s never clear if that is food for a tiger or made out of a tiger) in case the tiger returns. BUT HE NEVER DOES. Totally unnecessary to break our hearts like that at the end, but huge kudos for doing do Judith Kerr. I have some Judith Kerr food in my house ready for you in case you ever come round for tea. BUT SHE NEVER DOES.
Anyway, after all the excitement we got the kids to bed, watched two episodes of Stranger Things (which is set in 1984 when I was the age of some of the older teenagers and Nancy’s clothes and hairstyle are giving me some weird and confusing and triggering flashbacks to my two year relationship with my first girlfriend) and had an early night.
I was in a deep sleep by 10.30pm when the doorbell was suddenly rung several times with urgency and the dog was barking. It stopped and I nearly left it - perhaps it was an awful prank but I went downstairs to see my neighbours standing in the street, bathed in the blue light of emergency vehicles. Had Stranger Things come to Hertfordshire.
I was still half asleep but I went outside to find out what was going on and couldn’t quite make sense of what I’d been told to begin with, but gradually it became clear that a (presumed) drunk driver had crashed into the garage of my neighbour (which is the other half of the building where my own garage is and just twenty feet from my house) smashing up the door and wall and knocked into the gas meter or possibly gas main. So not only was the building unstable, but there was a gas leak and the police and firemen were instructing us (with not that much urgency) to go a good distance up the street.
What was most remarkable for me though was that this accident which had happened at some speed and must have made a Hell of a noise and woken none of us. Maybe if it had ignited the gas too we’d have paid attention.
After about five minutes I was told that I had to get everyone out of the house and get even further away, so we had the delightful task of waking our daughter and trying not to wake our son (but carry him out in his pram - I am not really keen for him to die) and getting our dog (we elected to leave the cat) and get dressed, all the time wondering if we were about to be consumed in a fireball. Were we wasting time and endangering our lives by looking for shoes?
And now it was really striking me how lucky we were, not only that it wasn’t our garage or house that had been hit, but that the crash hadn’t caused the spark that would light the gas and blow up… I don’t know… how much of the street would have gone up. Would we all have been killed? It was close enough to have at best caused immense structural damage. Had we escaped with our lives again? Why gas? Why?
We were probably outside for 30 or 45 minutes in the end and there was much kindness from our evacuated neighbours and people at the pub offering shelter and blankets, but the guys from Cadent had arrived - promptly as with the last two times we’ve needed them and it seemed like things would be sorted fairly quickly.
But my mind kept playing out the alternate universe reality where the actions of a drunk idiot (and it was much harder for him to crash into this garage than it was for him to miss it) had resulted in the death of my entire family (and in the worse case scenario my own survival). As it was he’d really fucked up my chance to continue in deep and beautiful sleep and that was only marginally worse than the destruction of all I love.
I felt pretty bad for my neighbours, who were taking it well and who were relieved that their car hadn’t been in the garage due to a bit of luck. If my garage had been as badly hit then my egolf would have been badly damaged and also I would no longer have anywhere to charge it once it was repaired, so again, if this unlucky thing had to happen, I had been pretty lucky.
Our son more or less slept through the whole thing. Our daughter did not bask in the romance of being out at night, which the play we’d just seen had said was a great thing and like me, just wanted to go back home.
And soon enough we were back in bed, but although the kids fell straight to sleep, I could not. I did play a bit of online poker and discovered that the people who play on a Saturday night are drunk and really stupid. So the £4 I won as a result did a lot to make up for what we’d been through.
