Immortal has another lucky escape

In the distance past on this blog I have written of my immortality. (So far) Many events, some more bizarre than others,  have conspired to kill me, and so far I have evaded death, which leads me to conclude he has something really nasty up his sleeve for me when that day eventually comes. Unless of course I really am immortal.

Anyhow, the point is he had another pop at me yesterday. In freezing fog and with snow covering lane 3 of the motorway I was dispatched to a single vehicle accident a car having struck the central reservation and bounced back into lane one, where it was now sideways on to traffic and showing no lights. In thick fog. In icy conditions. Not a good situation. Leaving the city I sensibly decided to swap the Volvo for a Land Rover.

Volvos are made in Sweden where it snows a lot, and you would think they would be good on snow and ice. There may well be, equipped with winter tyres and snow chains, but we have road tyres, no snow chains and the engine management computer programmed for the UK, where of course it never ever snows. Thus wheel spin is unavoidable and the traction control then tells the comupter top reduce power to stop the wheel spin, which thus stops all forward progress. Not good on snow then.

Landrovers, conversely are made in Birmingham, where it hardly ever snows, and are made out of bridge girders, with solid engineering invented by men in sheds, who drink bitter with bits in it and smoke pipes, and have never heard of health and safety. Actually that last bit is no longer true, but in essence the Landrover is solid, heavy, well built and will go anywhere as long as it is not damp or there is a Y in the day. The Discovery I took out was one of the newer ones with a computer system telling the 4 wheel drive what to do, which meant that it slipped and slided a little, but got us tot he incident no problem.

Lit up like a radioactive Christmas tree in lane one, with every possible red and blue lamp flashing to warn of the hazard we set about moving the car from the carriageway. On the face of it this would not be easy - it was extensively damaged and only had three wheels left, and one of those was at a crazy angle. Whilst my colleague set up a chevron of cones and warning signs I talked the driver into simply driving the car into the hard shoulder. We reasoned that as it was a total write off anyway, no more harm could be done by simple driving it with the back axle dragging on the carriageway. Like a wounded fox, it dragged itself clear in short order, and I set about the task of picking the bigger bits of debris from the road ready to reopen lane one. This had taken all of six minutes from start to finish, and during this time numerous sensible motorists had passed, paying heed to the 40 limit and fog warnings on the matrix signs, and noting the cones and flashing lamps.

At this point certain death approached in the form of an unlicensed gentleman of a migratory nature whose nationality I shall not disclose for fear of being branded racist. His country of origin might well rhyme with "waterproof Mac" and that is the only clue I shall offer. Coming from such a hot country neighbouring Iran, he has probably never seen snow before, so can perhaps be forgiven for not knowing that it is a very slippery substance. Particularly if you are running with racing slicks as you back tyres as he was. So, it is quite understandable that he was driving at an estimated 80 to 90 (witness account) when he lost control and punted a Corsa towards me before losing control and spinning a full 180 before slamming into the back of our Landrover. The Landrover, weighing I guess around 3 tonne was shoved from Lane one about 30 feet into the hard shoulder by the impact of his 1400 kg Astra. The resultant chaos as everyone else then took evasive action resulted in many cars going in many directions, bouncing off each other. I swear some of the cars were going in two directions at once.

Everyone except the Seat driver my colleague and I, were protected by metal boxes at this point. Seat man did a very credible 0 to 60 in about 1 second and hurdled the Armco from his position on the hard shoulder to the safety of the verge in such an impressive time that I have put him forward for a place on the Olympic team.

At some point in history, before the mechanical device that stacks the pins back up at the bowling alley was invented, there must have been a man standing at the end of the bowling alley to stand the pins back up. Standing where I was I had the same viewpoint he must have had - one fast moving missile incoming with around ten objects about to fly towards me but their trajectories completely unpredictable. The one saving grace was that I had swapped the 2 tonne Vovlo for the 3 tonne Landrover, and it didn't move as far and offered much better protection as I took shelter in it lea.

The resultant mayhem took the rest of the 10 hour shift to sort out, and put on paper, but once more death had been foiled in his attempts to get hold of my tarnished soul.

It is estimated that around 50 million Landrovers have been produced since 1948.
There are 57 million square miles of Land on earth of whcih 7 million square miles are desert or polar ice. Therefore statistically there is one Landrover for every square mile of land on earth.

Martins top tip for the week then, is to learn to run a mile very very quickly. Becasue I suspect there are more and more unlicenced migrant drivers taking to our roads, and only so many Landrovers to hide behind.