My car is due its MOT tomorrow. I have left it right till the last day again before my current certificate expires. I would have booked it in for today to allow myself time to get any necessary repairs, only I really needed to make a long journey in it - an important trip to my 2nd interview for that job in Liverpool.
I decided to set off early. Given the snowy conditions, I was eager to allow myself plenty of time to take a slow and steady ride and didn't want to get flustered and panicky if I hit any delays.
But as it turned out, I'd vastly over-compensated. There were no queues and even my self-imposed 50mph speed limit behind lorries was failing to significantly fill my abundance of journey allowance. I pulled in at Knutsford services to kill a bit of time (which I mainly did by amusing myself with the name Knutsford services), and after 45 minutes passed, I decided to get back on the road.
Not long after pulling into the first motorway lane, I could almost smell the Mersey in my nostrils. My thoughts started getting clouded by the interview ahead and nervous butterflies were hatching in my stomach. Other descriptive clichés may have also happened. Then suddenly, there was a big, alarming bang.
Damn!
A stone in the road had been flicked up by the dual wheels of a lorry in front. It then thwacked across the front of my car, presenting my windscreen with a wonderful four inch crack. That's the problem when you a first-lane crawler, you're always in the firing line of heavy goods vehicles catapulting road-bits.
An MOT has a lifespan of 365 days. Why had this happened on day 364, when there was no time to do anything about it? It was impossible not to start instinctively cursing myself. If only I hadn't stopped at those services for so long, it would have given me enough time to find somewhere in Liverpool to get my crack examined (feel free to insert your own anal or Northern-city-based-drug-reference joke here). Furthermore, if I hadn't stopped at the services at all, my windscreen would not have even been at the right place at the right time to break the flight of an oncoming brick. How frustrating. If I'd have just given the services a wide-berth completely, I would've achieved the journey completely damage free!
Mind you, having said this, I suppose it's all just a question of fate. If the timing and circumstances of my journey had been different, it's also possible that I'd have ended up in an even worse place at an even worse time. Like in a fatal motorway pile-up for instance - my timid little Micra, crushed and mangled, sandwiched between two big heavy goods vehicles.
I'd imagine that with an impact like that, many of the contents of the truck would also get ruined. It would have been especially sad, if that particular truck just happened to have been transporting a cargo-full donated food for the starving Africans. And it is highly likely, that with such a collision, the driver would have suffered terrible whiplash. Injuries potentially so severe, that they prevented him from ever driving another lorry again. Especially sad, if he relied on his lorry drivers wage to feed two young children (who in turn, with their father's employment terminated, could no longer afford to keep their cute dough-eyed little bunny rabbit).
But I reckon if this did actually happen, it might not be of much concern to me. I'd probably be preoccupied by my legs being crushed up into my torso so violently, that many of my internal organs had been pounded into a smooth paste. There's even a chance that the petrol tank could have combusted with a delayed shock from the impact, turning my car into a raging inferno. My skin bubbling and blistered with the heat of the flames, until it final charred off my screaming face - a face vainly begging for a merciful release from this agonizing demise.
So there you are. It's always best to look on the bright side.
In hindsight, I might have been really lucky to escape the fate of circumstance with just a cracked windscreen.
As I drove back from my interview, I called by at the MOT garage to enquire whether it was still worth even bothering getting my car tested tomorrow. To my relief, they informed me not only that the fracture was fixable, they would even do the work themselves prior to testing the rest of the car.
And to think I'd nearly deprived some innocent children of their beloved pet rabbit for that!
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