First a real one..
December 1992, I was heading down to East Anglia from Lancashire with my mum,dad,sister and dog to spend the holidays at my grandparents. I'd passed my driving test 4 months earlier and my dad and I were going to share the drive down. My dad insisted that my normal footwear at the time, Dr Martens boots, were not suitable for driving and wouldn't let me drive in them. So i drove the first hour and a half and we then changed places.

As my dad would be driving the rest of the way I sat in the passenger seat and changed my footwear from trainers to Doc M's, leaning forward in my seat, stooping to change my shoes.

As I was doing it my dad commented "looks like an accident up ahead" and I sat up to take a look. 2 seconds later we got rear-ended and my the force pushed my leg into the (thankfully closed) glove compartment. It cracked the bone and it still aches to this day. If i hadn't have sat up, my head would have hit the dashboard/glove compartment and the angle i was at would have almost certainly fractured my skull or compressed my spine. Some twat had pulled out from behind a lorry that was slowing down because of the crash ahead, ploughed straight into the back of the car behind us (narrowly avoiding squashing the baby in the car seat in the back), and pushed that car into mine. Our car was written off, had to go back to Lancashire on the back of a recovery vehicle, we couldn't open the boot to get the presents out it had been crushed and folded in so much.

On the way back home, the recovery driver turned on a local radio station and we heard John Lennon strike up the first words of "and so this is christmas...." which wasn't quite what we wanted to hear
(gaylord stinchcomb Ridicule is nothing to be scared of. AIDS is., Fri 20 Aug 2010, 12:43, Reply)