Monday, 28th February 2005.

Mr Bump

Well, I suppose I have to talk about it sooner or later.

It was Friday. I drove to work as usual, the thinning ice casting an eerie off-white sheen along the pavements. I'd been careful, thus far. The long road through Milton Park is one of stops and starts, certainly at rush hour. The frequent entrances to company car parks are prone to all manner of motorcyclists, cars and the occasional delivery truck - these are particularly inclined to rouse my impatience. And then there are the rare cars that want to come out: the endless dilemma of choosing to let them go or not, only to be met with frustration when you choose to give way while the traffic that comes towards you does not. You live with it. Truth be told, it's only really a bind if it occurs at the end of a long journey, as used to be the case when I lived in Reading. In a five minute rat run, it's something I barely notice.

Perhaps this is the problem: the familiarity gets to you. I was musing on nothing that morning, humming quietly to myself as I overtook the shuttle bus that runs from Didcot station to Taylor and Francis, and back. Across the next roundabout. I've done this journey so often I could do it in my sleep. Up ahead, two cars linger. Only my eyes don't see them lingering: I think they're moving. But one is stationary, signalling right, waiting for an appropriate gap in the oncoming traffic. Behind it, the car that now haunts my sleep was sitting, patiently, queued. Only at the last minute do I realise that I'm going too fast.

Brake. Screeeeee -
Sickening crunch.

"Oh, FUCK!"

The past few weeks, I've dreamed of car crashes. Not on an alarmingly regular, anxiety-fuelled basis, you understand: my nocturnal ramblings have too little consistency to construct any kind of coherent pattern. Instead, I have experienced odd moments: thumps, bangs, and - on one occasion - a full-blown encounter where I slid out of control on a motorway and wound up tackling a central reservation sideways on, tearing out posts and metal barriers on my way to certain death. At the last minute I woke up. And as I skidded to a halt now at the side of the road, I realised this is what I was trying to do.

Too late you realise you're not dreaming, and as a futile alternative you start to visualise winding back the clock: an Oxfordshire Prince of Persia and his own sands of time. Just a grain would have done it. What happened? Did I take my eyes off the road? Had I been speeding? Was it the ice? A combination of all three? Or was the truth as simple as the reality of my situation: had I failed to see the obvious? Had I slipped into complacency purely by not being awake enough?

I jumped out of the car, to be met with a tall, thin man who looked to be in his early forties, thinning hair offset by Freddy Mercury moustache. It was hardly the time to notice things like this, but I remembered thinking that he resembled a Queen fan - the obsessive sort, the ones who manage to imitate Mercury in terms of physical appearance, if not in voice. The sort who attend conventions with a religious fanaticism and who are seemingly always called Jim. He glared at me angrily. "Well, that's all I fucking need."
"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I'm sorry..."

I glanced first at his car - a dark-coloured Golf - and then at my own. As far as surface damage was concerned, Blodwen had come out the loser. The front of the Corsa was a mess: one headlight was missing entirely, its glass scattered back up the road, a hazard to the swerving vehicles now trying to avoid it as they slowed to survey the scene of the crash. The bonnet was bent, and the front bumper was skewiff and cracked, most likely necessitating a replacement. But it was the radiator that was the sorriest sight of all: it was smashed in entirely.

"I'm sorry, I'm sorry, I really am, I don't know what happened - I was too close, and the ice, and - "
"You were going too fast," he replied, quite correctly.
"I was. I'm sorry. What - what do we do now?"
Jim sighed. "We exchange details. And we sort out insurance."

My hands were shaking as I held the pen, and he had to write my name again as I dictated it to him - so spidery had been my handwriting. He wrote down his own name and address and handed it to me. I glanced again at his car. The damage seemed superficial - a slight dent in the back, and nothing much else, although I am reliably informed that the real damage occurs underneath, unseen until it's checked by a garage.

"I've just had a new exhaust fitted as well," Jim went on. "Thirteen hundred quid."

I will be the first to admit that I don't really know cars, but this seemed a trifle expensive to me. I glanced down at the exhaust in question: it was an impressive monster, gleaming and double-barrelled, lingering underneath the shell of a car upon which it didn't really look comfortable. I'd have taken Jim for a boy racer, but he seemed to be too old.

"We'll get it sorted," I said, still wishing that I could wake up from a nightmare that I knew was real. "I'm really, really sorry."
"At least neither of us is hurt," he said, patting himself down. "I don't think so, anyway."

Jim got into his car and drove away, leaving me at the side of the road. I returned to my mashed-up vehicle, climbed inside and glanced up through the windscreen: the green and beige of the office lingered in the distance, just a few hundred feet away. I cursed at the irony of being involved in an accident so close to where I worked, and then gunned the engine and limped home as carefully as I could.

The rest is dull. Supportive cuddles from my saintly wife: always at her best in a crisis, and certainly at her most beautiful and helpful. Insurance phone calls, garage details.The discovery that Jim was in fact named Barry. Barry Tingley. Mr Tingley. It sounds like something from one of Enid Blyton's fairy stories: perhaps a companion for Noddy or Mr Pink Whistle. In the afternoon, Emily and I were driven up to Oxford to collect the courtesy car that Direct Line provide; an air-conditioned, electric-windowed Fiesta, ironically nicer than the car we currently own. I remember remarking that under the terms of their policy, the Corsa will be returned to us cleaned inside and out, which was handy seeing as we hadn't got round to washing it for ages.

These things come in threes: I'm the third person in our team to have an accident like this in just over a week. Even though cold snaps are probably the busiest times of the year for garages, chop shops and insurance companies, you have to wonder whether the Engineering & Applied Science people are jinxed. Sara informed me that she was told that time slows down in that moment, while for her it seemed to rush by. For my part, I did experience a sudden slowness, although it wasn't the controlled focus that the Matrix characters seem to have, but rather a sense of horrid inevitability. I had slammed on the brake, and known instantly that it was a futile gesture, and that it would not be enough. That was indeed the case, but it took an apparent eternity to confirm it.

As Heather very kindly pointed out, "these things *do* happen - if they didn't, we wouldn't need insurance". I do, of course, feel very lucky that no one was injured - or worse - but the fact that it could have been worse is poor compensation for the idiocy of my mistake. I worry that to seem too accepting would imply complacency on my part, which is why I have chosen to beat myself up over it for at least a little while. Understand that I'm not going for martyrdom here: it's not an attempt on my part to illicit sympathy; merely an act of penance. The crux of the matter is that sometimes I am an unsafe driver, a crime to which I will freely admit. While several people have mentioned that it was lucky that Emily wasn't in the car, the simple truth is that if she had been, the accident would probably never have happened: while her constructive criticism very occasionally borders on backseat driving, there is an awful lot of truth in pretty much everything she says, and I could visualise her there that morning, crying "Slow down, you're getting too close!". And she would have been right.

So: you feel lucky, and you remind yourself that it's going to hurt you financially come next year's premium, but that a car is only a lump of metal. Cars can be replaced - people can't; it really is that simple. Mike told me of the aftermath of an accident that he had witnessed on the A33 that morning, where the bonnet had come clean through the windscreen, causing almost certain death to the car's inhabitants. You hear about things like that and you count your blessings. And you try and learn from the experience: next time, it could be a whole lot worse, which makes you all the more adamant that there won't be a next time.

It was last night before I actually got round to driving again, this time bringing the courtesy Fiesta back from the outskirts of Bristol, where we'd been visiting Ewan. It was fine, although splitting the driving proved to be a worthy exercise in light of our journey down, when we discovered an M4 crowded with Chelsea fans en route to Cardiff. A limousine roared past us almost as soon as we joined the motorway, blue and white scarf billowing from the right hand window. Twenty five miles down the road, we saw that it had been pulled over, and we hedged bets as to what it might be: a mechanical failure (unlikely, given how well these things are serviced), a speeding offence or perhaps a group of loutish fans throwing beer cans out of the tinted windows.

But it was before this piece of irony that I almost experienced my worst fears, when a car in the fast lane, not far ahead of us, decided to stop on the central reservation. Perhaps its engine had died, or perhaps it was just being stupid. The Toyota behind it - just in front of us - swerved violently into the middle lane, and we immediately followed, nearly having a collision in the process. For a moment I could visualise the twisted steel, the flesh meeting metal, the sideways skid as the posts ripped through the body and my dream became concrete. But we moved on, roaring into the west, and I said a silent prayer of thanks that Emily had been driving. I would have lost it.