Yeah, I'm good. It was an amazing experience. I've often performed a kind of meditation on being involved in a car crash while driving, especially on the motorway. I think most drivers probably do the same. You're hurtling along at seventy miles an hour in a metal missile, I'd be concerned for any driver who claimed they didn't think about death from time to time.
The lorry was in the nearside lane, the Lexus on the outside with the three of us in Nirvash in the middle. I was about halfway down the length of the lorry when it started to pull into my lane without checking to see if anything was there or indicating first. I put my foot on the brakes and managed to get back to about three quarters of the way down its length before it went into my passenger side, forcing me into the fast lane where we collided with the Lexus.
I'd spent a couple of hours the day before putting together a tape compilation, nintey minutes of the themes to FLCL, Bleach, Revolutionary Girl Utena, Ramna 1/2, The Melancholy of Haruhi Suzumiya, Gunbuster I & II, Ouran High School Host Club, Sailor Moon, Azumanga Daioh, Eureka Seven and Tengen Toppa Gurren-Lagann. The climax of the whole tape - the very final song - was the current closing theme of Gurren-Lagann. We had it on full blast. It was a beautiful sunny day and the clouds were tiny little puffs with thicker bands around the horizon.
Translated from Japanese, this was what we were hearing when the van on either side buckled and sounded like a fast clicking or clattering, not like metal at all:
Peace for everyone, it's alright
Love and rock, everyone together okay
Let's sing together, a song for you
Love and peace, rock my song!
All three vehicles continued together in full contact for about a hundred to a hundred and fifty metres before pulling apart. I'm really grateful for that. Being sandwiched between the two of them felt strangely like the safest place to be, in that I was unlikely to flip or skid or spin. Forward was the only option... well, it wasn't even really an option. The Lexus started to spin out slightly in front of us but didn't lose control at any point. I think it must have been terrifying for Jim Warburton, the driver of the Lexus. He just had the crash barrier on the other side of him with the other carriageway only metres away. Compared to him and his wife we were snug as bugs in rugs.
Once we were free of the other vehicles we pulled over to the hard shoulder, got out and exchanged details. I was very glad for my day job, I deal with so many of these incidents from the other side of the phone line. Mrs Warburton was pretty shaken. We managed to exchange details before police came on scene, which was tricky because the lorry driver and his passenger were Romanian, didn't speak a word of English and all their documents were in Romanian. There was also a right decent bloke called Calum who saw the whole thing and stopped at the scene as an independent witness. His account bears out mine above.
I was helping Pin move to London at the time. All his worldly possessions were in the back of Nirvash. Thankfully nothing was damaged.
Having done all the necessary things it was just a case of waiting for the various emergency services to do their things and then get recovered. I decided that the best use of our time would be to use our phones to go online from the hard shoulder and update our Facebook status, which made us chuckle for a while. I also insisted on group photos... sadly I didn't get Calum and the Romanians as they had to be on their way (the lorry was barely damaged at all). A bit disappointing that most people chose to defer their answer about what they intended to use their near death experience to achieve (I've decided I'm going to be better on the pull from Friday on). Pissing about seemed to cheer people up quite a lot.
The punchline of the whole thing involves the replacement hire van we picked up from near the recovery garage in Watford. It managed to get us to within three miles of Pin's new home before the clutch failed and we were awaiting recovery for the second time that day. Thankfully the recovery company was owned by the same people as the rental company and they took us the final few miles to Pin's place, where all Pin's lovely new housemates helped us unload with lightning speed while we pissed off the neighbourhood by making a racket with a 40ft truck that blocked the whole road. That was quite a result for me, as if the rental van hadn't broken down I would have had to drive straight back to Watford, hire a taxi to guide me back to where I'd hired it, sleep in the van, give it back the next day and then get the train home from Watford. The way it worked out I could just have a few beers, crash at Pin's, get the new Ultralyd album from Select-a-Disc the next day and then travel back on the train from Waterloo.
Here are the photos.
The insurance side of things might be pretty tricky because of the language barrier. Liability is as clear as the weather we had on the day, but I'm anticipating that this will run for months before I get money for another ride. I'm not fully comp so I don't get a replacement as part of my policy. Thankfully colleagues at work are being good about ride sharing so it just looks like travel to and from gigs and rehearsals will be a problem. We'll manage somehow, Hunting Lodge have an amazing ability to fail at all logistical planning and then pull it together at the last second.
If I can get the full value of the van back then Friday will actually be a major result for me. Nirvash needed about £300.00 worth of non-urgent work doing, nothing that made it unsafe but all stuff that had to be done. If the claim is successful then I'll actually make money out of it.
All in all things could have been a lot worse. No one was hurt, everyone is insured, there's a witness and none of Pin's belongings were damaged. We managed to finish what we set out to do by getting the boy to his new digs.
Everyone keeps telling me that I'll get a delayed reaction to the crash at some point. I've mainly been fairly euphoric since and don't particularly want to second guess it. If it happens it happens. It was quite strange at the time to barely even get a fight or flight response during the crash, it was as though I instantly went into emergency call mode. Whether that means I'm healthy or not I don't know... I am getting a little tired of being told what I'm supposed to be feeling though, or people seeming slightly alarmed when I tell them the opposite of what they strangely seem to want to hear. Hellbunny's been pretty awesome throughout, motor claims are his thing and he's happy to just have me in one piece no matter how obnoxious I act.
I've replayed it all many times in my head, exactly as you might expect. I don't think I could have handled it any better than I did. There was nowhere for me to go with vehicles in both lanes either side. Perhaps that's why I'm fine now, everyone's well and I have no regrets about anything I did, there was no whiplash because it wasn't a sudden jolting collision... it was the best possible outcome for that particular set of circumstances. |
