Tonight:
5°c
Last week I wrote about a great night-time drive I took down the Edgware Road and this week I have to report that the vehicle that made the run, my much-loved Fiat Multipla, is in the knackers' yard. I don't want to preempt the engineer's report for the other driver's insurers but, to my untutored eye, the car looks to be a write-off.
Here's what happened: I was driving along the Wandsworth Road on Thursday morning when a pick-up truck pulled out of a drive-through McDonald's and straight into me. One second I was a knight of the open road, the next I was unhorsed. No one was hurt but, as my car was totally immobilised, the police were called. In their wake came the whole panoply of car healthcare: I called the self-styled "Fourth Emergency Service" and they despatched a low-loader ambulance but meanwhile my crippled steed was causing tailbacks, so the police flagged down another breakdown truck which towed it off the main road.
Within 40 minutes my car had been removed and everyone was gone. I walked home and called my own insurers; they were as sympathetic as a Harley Street medic: my legal cover would handle everything, from pursuing the claim, to ensuring the car was repaired - if possible - to providing me with a replacement vehicle in the meantime; on Saturday morning, the car was duly delivered by a spruce young man with a charming bedside manner.
My analogies aren't merely flippant, because the whole episode did strike me as a quite bizarre confirmation of the extent to which ours is, first and foremost, a car culture. We may not be capable, as a society, of providing ourselves with the healthcare that does the job but when it comes to vehicular illness there are no waiting lists, myriad-available consultants and the latest computer diagnostic techniques available at the push of a button - no matter which postcode you live in. It's enough to make even a hardened partisan of the National Health Service, like me, consider whether or not private insurance may be the way forward.
Or would be, were it not that we're talking about a car here, not a human being. I've never made any secret about my growing disillusion with London driving and London drivers and I see no reason to begin recanting now, because if it weren't for the crippling weight of traffic in our city I wouldn't have been in the car in the first place. I was driving the kids to school only because I find taking them on their bicycles too nerve-racking in winter, especially given the kind of heavy rain there was last Thursday morning.
So, there you have the vicious steely circle: my car died precisely because London's roads are cluttered up by people like me: those who are too fearful to use greener transport methods, even though we know full well that they would make this a happier, safer city.
Reader views (1)
I love your colourful use of language and the metaphorical descriptions that you pepper in your column. But the point is clear: we as a world do need to stop cluttering the roads and start thinking more green, not just for the environment, but for our sanity! Traffic is the pits!
- Bonnie Schoneberg, Hilo, USA, 31/03/2008 20:09
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