slowmotion said:
That site is a very grim place. What really leaps out is the slaughter of 17 to 25 year olds in the evening and night. Their pie chart segment would probably look a whole lot worse if it was expressed as miles travelled by that age group, but I'm just guessing that. The prospect of my daughter being driven back from a party by a tanked-up young man who has absolutely no concept of his own mortality makes me very scared indeed.
When I was in my early 20s, I was being given a lift back from Great Malvern to Coventry by a drunken mate. His driving wasn't
too bad until a young woman in a sports car overtook him, giving him a cheeky wave as she did so. Red rag to a bull... What followed was a horribly dangerous high-speed pursuit down some fairly minor roads. I really thought that we were going to die. We had several near misses and then came to a section of road with signs indicating road works ahead. The woman disappeared round a bend ahead and my friend floored the throttle to try and catch her. As the bend started to open out in front of us, we screamed in unison when we saw that we were bearing down on a row of traffic cones behind which a huge steamroller was parked. Scores of cones were sent flying as my mate wrestled with the wheel. We missed the steamroller by inches. If we'd hit that thing at that speed, I'm pretty sure that all of us would have been killed. Suddenly sobered, we slowed down and let the sports car get away...
I continued seeing SS (my stepdaughter - SS = Step-Sprogette) after
The Big Bust-up with her mother. Typically, she would come round once a week for a meal and a chat. One such evening, SS was watching TV while I was cooking the meal. I heard her phone ring, then an increasingly agitated conversation taking place. Something didn't sound right. Suddenly, there was an anguished cry, followed by sobbing. I ran in from the kitchen and found SS in floods of tears, her mobile at her feet. The 17 year old sister of one of her friend's had been killed in a car accident the previous night, caused by her drunken boyfriend losing control at high speed driving back from a country pub. SS told me that he always drove too fast, and was usually drunk. She had been given a lift by him herself a couple of times...
Yes, alcohol and driving do not make great partners.
