Lucky indeed

Hmm, why would someone park their car right in front of 44 tonne HGV you might ask? After all the picture suggests some plucky motorist making a stance against some empty headed trucker out looking for the next ordinary driver he can terrorise. Or perhaps the picture was taken in France and the driver of the yellow car has found a space in front of a lorry to park in as he goes off to the market or beach. Believe me, parking in France is often just like this.



Or, it could be this.


Driving back from The Grandmaster and Audrey's place on Saturday afternoon, bimbling along at 70 on the M25 between junctions 11 and 10, anti-clockwise I was in lane 2 overtaking a French lorry driving on the inside lane at around 65. I wasn't whizzing past him as the traffic was quite heavy and I was behind another lorry, but I was doing around 5mph more than Monsieur Merde (look it up on a french translation site). Kid and Pie were happily listening to their iPods and Hellsbells was settling back for a comfy doze. I was listening to Planet Rock on a low volume so as not to wake Hellsbells.

That's when it happened. The stretch of the M25 we were on had no hard shoulder and we were about a mile from the A3 turn off. That's when we felt the first impact. Monsieur Merde, presumably like most HGV drivers, a person who presumably believes himself a professional driver had decided to move into our lane. The flaw in his planned move was in not checking for the presence of a BRIGHT FUCKING YELLOW SEAT LEON!

The first impact hit Hellsbells door. We know this because Pie was looking out that side at the time. This knocked us at an angle to Monsiuer Merde and his 44-tonne killing machine and the second impact on Kids door swung us into a skid from which we ended up pinned to the front of his juggernaut at 65mph at a right angle to the direction of our actual travel!

The next 20 seconds, which seemed like an eternity were the most terrifying of my entire life, and undoubtedly those oh Hellsbells, Kid and Pie. We travelled like this for around 350 yards with plumes of tyre smoke all around us, the screeching noise matched only by the crunching of metal collapsing under the sheer force of his momentum and that of Hellsbells and the girls.

As far as I could see, we were dead, or at the least severely injured. The one thing I remember is looking out of the passenger side past Hellsbells and seeing nothing but the front end of a 44-tonne murder machine blocking the entire view.

Eventually we could sense that we were slowing down and Monsieur Merde, showing some degree of belated skill had eventually managed to push us into the hard shoulder, but this has to be tempered with the fact that we were PINNED TO HIS FUCKING CAB and where he went, we went.

The picture was taken around 2 minutes after we'd stopped and a sense of normality had kicked back in. The girls were, as you might imagine, hysterical and very badly shaken, but barring a few bruises from seat belts, a bit of higher blood pressure and pulse. They were fine. Hellsbells and myself held it together at the scene and called the police and ambulance as a precaution. In a typically French manner, Monsieur Merde sat in his cab and lit a cigarette.

The Highways Agency officers arrived after 10 minutes and stopped the traffic whilst I drove the car off the front off the lorry and parked it alongside the hard shoulder rather than across it. They kindly took the details and helped sort he incident out, but did you know this? Unless there is a fatality, or serious injury then the police no longer turn up at such major accidents. That's right, the fuckwit coppers who are only too happy to turn up at your side if you do 45 in a 40 zone, can't be fucking arsed to come out to a major accident where either one of the drivers might have been guilty of a crime, perhaps in Monsieur merde's case his tachograph might have shown excessive travel time, or maybe he'd just knocked an aperitif back. Irrelevant, because no-one seemed badly hurt. I can hardly wait until the time a copper pulls me up on a minor driving infringment.

Get this as well. Despite the reasonable amount of traffic, not one person stopped to offer help or witness the incident. Not one. Well, maybe one person did. A french lorry driver in an act of understandable camaraderie stopped to help his compatriot. But did anyone stop to witness for us? No. How the fuck could people have witnessed this and not stopped. How could they have known there were no serious injuries? The Great British Fuckwit, Sun reading, I'm alright Jack pull up the ladder, greedy, self obsessed society showed its' true colours on Saturday. Thatcher was right, there is no such thing as society. She killed it.

The paramedics were fucking excellent as one expects. Calm, reassuring with an attitude of nothing being too much trouble. I thanked them profusely for helping Pie and Kid, especially as Pie was close to passing out through the shock.

As for the car, well badly smashed down the passenger side, all four tyres were taken back to the metal banding. Remember this car is less than a month old and had 800 miles on the clock. That's a lot of new tyre tread to burn though. But, that car didn't flip, didn't spin, didn't buckle. It held the road superbly considering the force it was under. It saved our lives.

SEAT - your little car is a fucking miracle. Luck may have played a part, but so must the design and construction iof the car. 10 years ago, or even in our previous 'second' car the awful Vauxhall Meriva, we'd have been dead. and Grocerjack would really have been unable to 'get off his back, go to town and not let them down. Oh no.'

Later, GJ