On Friday and yesterday morning, I finally got round to examining something that happened a few weeks back. It occurred when I was driving out to the big bird-flu report case, which is why it was put to the back of my mind for so long. I’ve driven past the site of the near miss a couple of times, and thought maybe I should stop and take a closer look and on Friday afternoon, on the way to Valerie’s (spending the weekend in Airth) I finally got round to it.

I must admit, having looked on Google Satellite and Street View, I almost wish I hadn’t. At the time, my senses were so heightened by the report case that I simply carried on with my day. With hindsight, yesterday morning, I felt a bit shaky. I almost don’t want to post about it, for fear of worrying my mum (sorry Mum!) but this is the first time in a long time where I think I came close to death and I kind of want to record that.

So then, back to the 14th January, early afternoon. The day is overcast, the roads are wet and dirty and I’m driving up the A701, a few miles north of Dumfries. The road is winding. Bends and dips. I’m in the kind of zen state which only a report case induces. I’m filled with adrenaline and channeling it into a kind of intense focus. I guess the closest comparable state, if you’ve ever experienced it, is when you are actually in an accident and everything slows down and suddenly there’s this amazing clarity as your brain sees every single detail, as if in slow motion. It’s not quite as intense as that, but that is the nearest analogy.

There’s a taxi in front of me, a little white boxy car. We go over the brow of a hill and he suddenly signals, brakes hard and comes to a halt to turn right. There are cars coming. The road surface is greasy and slowing harder than I expect, but I safely come to a standstill behind him. My mind processes the fact that it was hard to stop and I glance in the side mirror and it dawns on me that we just came over the brow of a hill. I check the rear view mirror and the back windscreen is filthy and I reach out a hand to the wiper button.
As the wiper flicks, my eye catches movement to my left. A red car, still at speed, on the grass verge beside me. I watch as he comes to a halt. Fortunately, the verge is flat, the car doesn’t flip and he manages to stop, just before he comes to a farm track, beyond which is a telegraph poll.

The car in front of me finally turns right and I can move. I draw forward a few feet and look into the car. There’s a young man in the driving seat and others in the car. Teenagers out for a run. They look okay, but I signal at the young man to check if he is okay. He signals back that he’s fine and (feeling relieved I don’t have to stop and help) I drive on.

So that’s it. No big deal and everything is fine. I carried on, did my job. I spent four hours in my PPE, made the diagnosis, the case is still going and life went on. But if that young man’s reflexes hadn’t been so fast, I don’t think I’d still be here.

I stopped last night and took a couple of photographs. As I topped the brow and saw the place, I wanted to stop, but there was a car behind me and there was no time to stop, so I passed the place, stopped in a layby and returned.

What I hadn’t realised is how offset this “crossroads” is. If you look closely at the picture above, you can see tyre tracks in the grass. They stop at the daffodils. The right turn is on the left of the photo and this is looking back at the brow of the hill we all came over.

I looked it up on street view this morning, then transferred over to satellite and this is what I saw. The two green stripes are where I believe the taxi and I were waiting. The red stripe is where the red car stopped. Life is fragile, is it not?

And yet here I am. The young man in the car had amazing reflexes. If you look at the tyre tracks and where he came off the road, he must have been super fast and had amazing control of his vehicle. I wonder whether, like all three of my children, he grew up playing racing games that accurately mimic that experience.

There isn’t any deeply meaningful addendum to this post. After all, nothing did happen and I’m still here. I spent yesterday eating good food and the afternoon watching TV. Today I will go to Valerie’s religious service and praise God and then I will go home with Triar. Tomorrow I will go back to work and deal with my cases and help the people I can help and try to be the best I can. There seems to be increasing unrest in the world, but my small corner of it is the only place where I can have any real influence.

I hope that, whatever is happening in your own life, that you can find peace. You never know what is around the next corner and we can’t control everything. Thank you for reading and take care.