With a rather scary birthday only a week away I’m starting to feel a little old and somewhat past it. My wonder years, the spring of my life and, apparently, the best days of my life, are over. Gone, never to return again.
I’m going to be twenty five. Twenty five. Oh dear.
“Still a wee bairn” my little old granny would say but I don’t feel it. I feel ancient and the aching legs that carry me to work on a Monday morning after a weekend spent chugging around a football pitch pay testament to the fact that I’m no longer the sprightly young thing of yesteryear.
Anyway, enough of my premature ramblings and on with what I was actually going to talk about; car accident claims.
So that’s where the getting old thing comes in.
With this terrible birthday just around the corner, the onset of old age has brought with it a realisation that I’m not actually invincible.
I used to be invincible. I used to be Action Man/Rambo/Super Ted incarnate and nothing could destroy me.
They were the days when me and my equally grubby little pals would gobble obscene quantities of tooth-rotting Wham Bars on the way home from school and would then, in an E number-induced fit of hyperactive nine-year-oldness, play chicken with the cars speeding past.
The thought of causing a car accident and receiving serious personal injuries was the last thing on my mind. I was probably more frightened of getting caught and having my skinny little legs whacked with a wooden spoon by my enraged mother but, with the E numbers pumping through my veins, I did it all the same.
Playing chicken was by no means the only death-defying thing that the young me would indulge in but it does demonstrate perfectly the fact that I believed I was immune from harm.
I did get a bit of a shock when a bone in my arm took exception to my toppling from the top of a tree and decided to snap in two, but superhuman powers soon returned following the removal of my much-graffitied cast and I didn’t look back.
Until now.
Now, not even in my most inebriated of states, can I see myself prancing about in the road in front of an oncoming car. Not because it would be a pointless thing to do and not because I’d probably get a thick ear from the bemused driver, but because I’d be frightened that the car wouldn’t stop and I’d end up as strawberry jam on the tarmac.
A road accident, personal injuries and an ensuing car accident compensation claim are probably very real possibilities so I think I’ll make sure I stick to the pavement on way back home this evening.
But all this invincibility isn’t so very far in the past.
I passed my driving test at seventeen and, unleashed onto the roads unaccompanied for the first time, I was, to put it politely, an eejit.
My chariot was a rusting, knackered-out old Metro with the power of forty one horses under the bonnet and a crazed teenager holding the reins. I gave that car some welly and, boy, didn’t anyone unfortunate enough to have ventured out onto the roads at the same time know about it.
How I managed to avoid causing a car accident back then is something of a miracle. My rev counter seemed to be permanently in the red and every junction in Hampshire must have had a bit of rubber from my tyres deposited on it.
One particularly stupid habit was my indulgence in a game created by a few friends who also possessed decidedly dodgy and dangerous cars – The 60mph Challenge. These friends were the aforementioned Wham Bar boys who had now grown up, in body if not in mind. Anyway, The 60mph Challenge was the vital culmination of any trip to do burnouts in the nearby supermarket car park or visit to McDonald’s to attach countless straws together to make an enormous prodding stick which could then be used from a distance to poke the unfortunate kid behind the counter.
So, The 60mph Challenge. This consisted of travelling along a certain stretch of road in our village and attempting to hit 60mph before reaching the national speed limit sign. Not such a hard task in itself, but then the stretch of road was only a hundred metres or so long and there was a roundabout in the middle of it.
My poor little Metro never did complete the challenge but, looking back, there were rather a few hairy moments as I attempted to tackle the roundabout at some crazy speed, more than once bouncing off a kerb and, with hubcaps flying through the air, nearly ending up embedded in a house.
No way would I try that now. As I said earlier, what an eejit.
When I look back at those years spent ragging that rusty old Metro around the streets, how I survived without causing a car crash is beyond me. If I tried half of that stuff now I’m sure I’d end up either six feet under or the subject of a costly car accident claim for compensation.
So that’s why, in my wise old age, I tut tut when I spot some spotty kid driving like a lunatic, speeding along country lanes and weaving in and out of the city traffic. I can see that they’re so close to causing a road accident and being on the receiving end of a car accident claim but why can’t they?
I guess I really am just getting old. By: Simon Jacobs