Tag Archives: Airth

A Near Miss

Blog, Scotland, The Vet Who Came In from the Cold, Travel, , , ,

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.

Old Haunts, New Discoveries

Blog, Scotland, , , ,

I spent last weekend with my old friend, Valerie. Many years ago, when John and Anna were young, we moved there as Charlie (the children’s dad) went to study at Stirling University. I was introduced to Val at the door of a portacabin classroom. She too, had recently moved to the area, and her youngest child was enrolled into the same preschool class as John.

In an ironic twist, I was reluctant to become fast friends, or invest too much. I was sure Valerie would move on. Given I had probably moved more times that she had (though as she was from South Africa, I hadn’t moved as far) this makes me roll my eyes at my own preciousness now. Still, she was so lovely that I couldn’t resist for long and I very soon came to see her as one of my favourite people in the world. When Andrew was born, she babysat for me, when I couldn’t find a nursery or childminder, and I spent many happy hours with her, while our children played or attended swimming lessons.

During that time, one of our local haunts was the Pineapple. This bizarre architectural structure was a remnant from a time when exotic fruits were a novelty, so rare and expensive that only the aristocracy could enjoy them. Only the high walls and distinctive central edifice remain. The glass houses that once leaned against the high walls are long gone.

The original structure must have been even more imposing. It is built on a ridge with a steep slope in front, which is largely free of trees, presumably to maximise the hours of sunlight to the maximum available. At the time we visited though, one of the chief pleasures of our children was to lie on the grass and roll down that slope, landing dizzy and laughing at the bottom, as Valerie and I sat on the grass.

As well as the walled garden, with its cropped grass and landscaped trees and bushes, the house is surrounded by mature woodland, where there are well trodden paths through the trees, where there are ancient yews alongside sturdy oaks and lofty sycamores. Triar was with us and Valerie and I took him on a lovely walk.

We retraced our steps and ended our walk where we began, in the walled garden. It was here that Valerie noticed for the first time, after years of visiting, that one of the trees in the garden was a mulberry bush. Better still, it was replete with rapidly ripening fruit.

Other than the (mostly forgotten) nursery rhyme, “Here we go round the mulberry bush” I had never come across mulberries in any form. We found a few that were ripe and they were sweet and delicious, with a distinctive flavour. Valerie though, was reminded of her childhood in South Africa, where she had a mulberry bush in her garden and used to rear silkworms that they kept in containers, feeding them off the leaves and trading leaves for silkworms with her friends.

All in all, it was another wonderful weekend, with memories and love… as well as wine in the hot tub!

For those who read last week’s post, I have removed the section that perhaps should have remained private, on the request of my mum. That said, as ever, I appreciate the love and support of the many women who reached out to me. You know who you are, and I value all you have said to me very highly. You have helped in easing my mind.

Autumn is rapidly approaching. My house has been wonderfully cool over the summer, but is beginning to feel chilly and I am debating with myself about when to put the heating on. Given it is an ancient system, with a boiler whose functioning I don’t really understand, I am holding off for as long as I can. I should probably get a gas engineer out to check the boiler before winter and getting radiators with thermostats is on my list of things to do, but it will have to wait, for now. I hadn’t intended to buy a project house, but that is what I ended up doing, after all.

I’ll leave you with some autumnal pictures from Blackbird Lane, which currently has more blackberries than blackbirds, and will probably shortly be painted with purple bird poo!

Have a good week all!