Many times have I been guilty of saying, “I nearly died,” but today I did…nearly that is.
It was a week before the New Year. I crossed the road, looked right around a mass of parked cars and left, and then proceeded to put one foot in front of the other, when a car came at me, like a bat out of hell, hooting and fixing me with Death Eater stare.
After composing myself and setting off again I thought: “Why the hell are you hooting, I’m the one who nearly died.”
My NDEs (near death experiences) usually consist of misunderstandings with four-wheel drives.
They think that I am going to stop and wait in the freezing cold while they all sit inside with radios. I think they are going to stop for me for the same reason. Actually no I don’t, I just think that they should. And that is where the misunderstandings between pedestrians and motorists begin.
When I was in my first year at Uni I was telling my friend about these misunderstandings. “When people are not sure whether to cross the road or not, I go,” I said. Others tend to stay glued to the spot – probably the result of some safety mechanism, which has possibly passed me by. The conversation ended up with my friend having to pull me back from a road of oncoming cars. A part of me, despite my gratitude, did think I would have made it to the other side. Then again I wanted to get to the other side of the road not the after-life.
It’s only when I’m in the car, when the shoe is on the pedal and not on road, that I think some people may have a death wish. Exhibit one: People listening to their ipods, crossing the road mid-song.
They don’t seem to realise that this is not some musical where a knight with too much hair gel is going to scoop them up and run with them to his country house to meet his mother. This is real life.
Exhibit two: Cyclists. I know I may get harangued for this but I do believe some cyclists have a death wish. Probably slightly scarred after waiting to cross a main road one day by paramedics attending to a man who had been knocked off his bike, their very presence makes me nervous. I often hold my breath after spending five minutes debating whether I can safely overtake them yet, and actually feel a sense of achievement after a hurried look in my mirror tells me they are still upright.
Of course some people are just asking for trouble: mountaineers, white-water rafters and other adrenaline junkies.
You can’t say that everyone who goes up a mountain or takes to water is asking for it, but you definitely open yourself up to more opportunities of having a NDE.
Sometimes one may be left to wonder if the adrenaline rush was worth it, whether it be falling down a black ski slope…backwards during a spot of skiing, tearing a retina bungee jumping, trying to rescue a friend in a lightning storm, being thrown out of a raft on a grade 5 rapid or nearly drowning whilst trying to catch waves off the West African Coast.
My first near-death experience in water happened in the River Nile in Uganda, but we were warned in advance. Our instructor told us we would all end up under water and could we try and hold onto our paddles. I’ll let you hazard a guess as to how many of us actually reappeared with them. I personally had more pressing things to worry about, such as reaching the surface again.
The second was in Ghana’s stormy seas where as I went further out to reach my friends and was caught slightly unawares. Before I knew it I was swirling round, seeing nothing but sand, swallowing half the seawater and spent the next hour coughing my guts out.
It seems that the more dramatic NDEs happen abroad. There must be something in the water.
While trying not to get run over in England, I am also avoiding unnecessary electrical items such as hairdryers. I always thought if you wanted to be electrocuted (if you were that way inclined) you would have to do something like dry your hair in the bath, when really you just have to have long sopping wet hair and a hairdryer – the real reason why I binned mine and haven’t purchased another since 2005.
This all makes me sound very unfortunate, but rest assure these things have taken place over a few years.
Although I do have a friend who set her head on fire with a tea-light (lets be under no illusion that you need a big flame to so some damage), fell down the stairs of a double decker bus and nearly crashed into a tree all in the space of a week.
Other NDEs include a builder dropping a metal pole that was centimetres from landing on a pedestrian’s head and being on a plane that snapped in half once it had landed somewhere in Germany.
A final thought: On a group adventure in the Judean desert, someone said to a vertigo sufferer, as they walked around a rock facet: “You don’t fall off the pavement so why would you fall off a mountain?”
On the one hand I thought he had a very good point. Unless under the influence, most people tend not to fall off the pavement so why don’t we think of mountains as pavements in the sky?
But not being one to deal easily with straight lines whether it be cutting or walking, combined with the fact that a year later I witnessed my best friend who is better at straight lines than me, fall off a cliff somewhere in the Atlas mountains (she reappeared to tell the tale), proves this argument needs some work.
I should have told him to jump off a cliff.
