Near miss

Following my hospital visit I took an extra day off work to recover my strength, having had no food for an extended period of time. It was a glorious day, part of a tremendous week of mild weather which put all thoughts of snowdrifts far behind me as I got all the bikes out of the garage and spent a considerable period of time getting the tires pumped up and various saddles and handlebars tightened.

I had Angus for company as Sharon took the other three to their swimming lessons after school. You have to keep an eye on Angus to make sure he doesn't wander out on to the pavement and road and he was watching me from the edge of the driveway as I was talking to Sandy and Fae across the road. A few minutes later, once I had returned to the tire pumping (using the automatic pump running off Sharon's car battery), there was a loud bang and I looked up to see Sandy's Audi on our side of the street. The handbrake hadn't been on properly and the car had rolled out of the drive, across the street, arcing slightly downhill, and crashed into Bob's wall just a yard or so down from our boundary, knocking a couple of the top stones seriously askew and breaking the mortar and moving the supporting blocks beneath. It was just a few yards away from where Angus had been standing minutes before and had happened so quietly that if you had been facing the wrong way you wouldn't have known it was coming.

The car itself was remarkably unscathed and, thankfully, so was Angus. The boot was open as Sandy had been in the middle of unloading some plants when it rolled away. It just goes to show how close you can be to completely unforeseen tragedy.