to be honest
with the benefit of retrospect, I have had many actual close shaves with certain death, but as human nature tends to do, your mind seems to scab over the memory.

What will stay with me was a car crash I wasnt involved in, but should have been.

My estranged father had been intouch and wanted to see me over the weekend. He worked in the oil industry and for once had meetings near my home on a huge ocean going tug in Leith (thats the Peoples Republic of Leith, the waterfront bit of Edinburgh). This was, at the time, one of the largest ocean going tugs in the world. So I was invited to spend the day with him, clambering all over this massive boat. I met some of the crew, marveled at the bridge, the galley, the equipment on the deck. Later he dropped me off home and offered to pick me up tomorrow, as he had to pop back with paperwork and we could then watch it leave harbour. He would be back round early.

Of course the cnut never turned up.

In the days before universal mobile phones, you just had to imagine that he had forgotten or it got called off, but you sort of accepted that instant communication was not some sort of human right nor expectation.

Later the confused telephone call from a policeman pretty much answered my worries.

The police had found a business card with my home phone number writen on it in the debris of his massive car crash littered around the motorway. He had gone out with an uncle of mine on the beer, crashed out at his place, got up early still pissed and half way to Edinburgh, spun the car, crossed the central resevation and got t-boned by a builders merchants lorry full of bricks. The car was a right off, he was in hospital for months, and needless to say the lorry hit the passenger side where an 11 year me would have been sitting.

Thank God for drunk driving!
( Fire & Forget it's the only way to be sure, Wed 25 Aug 2010, 8:57, 1 reply)

as a postscript....
I only found out about the drunk driving recently.

It would seem this was some massive open secret amongst my extended family, and the police never knew as he was so close to death, no bloods were ever taken for offical analysis. He was never charged. I was told he had hit black ice, which was seasonally plausible.

He also claims he survived because he wasnt wearing a seatbelt, as he was squeezed out of his seat just as the car was crushed between the lorry, the crash barrier and a massive bridge abutment, although he has always worn it since. He did break every bone down one side with the exception of his spine, and is paying for it now as old age and injury mean he can hardly walk.
( Fire & Forget it's the only way to be sure, Wed 25 Aug 2010, 8:58, closed)