h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I've just found out that my mother has been in a car crash.

It happened during a rainstorm late on Friday night (that's early Saturday morning UK time) at a cross-roads near her home. Due to the bad weather she somehow missed the stop point on the junction and got T-boned by a car coming the other way. She is currently in hospital in Toronto with a broken shoulder and minor head injuries. With luck she'll be out and back home in the next couple of days.

The moral of the story?

Always check your answerphone. My step-father had left three messages for me in the last 40+ hours. He finally got through to me when I was actually in, and I only realised that he'd left messages after taking his call.

At least she's ok...

Yes. Glad to hear she's OK. It could have been a lot worse, I suppose.

B

Yes, she could have been driving the new Subaru Impreza as opposed to the ancient Dodge.

Sorry to hear about the accident, GD. Hope Mrs Desk gets well soon.

best wishes for a speedy recovery!

All The best to Mama Desk and hopefully she'll soon be back on the tennis court.

My mother used to be quite good at tennis as a kid

However when she returned to her old home town in the late 60s after her first marriage broke up, the powers that be decided that she was something of a persona non grata, and she wasn't allowed to join the local tennis club. The upshot of this is that I don't know one end of tennis racquet from another, because I never had any exposure to the game as youngster.




The message from the hospital is that Mum is sort of up and around. My step-father is trundling her around in a wheel chair and she's talking OK but is still in some pain and is tired and can get a bit disorientated still.

The next fun episode is how we break the news to her mother, my grandmother, that her daughter has been in a car crash: and to do it in such a way that won't cause her to worry herself half to death.

That I'm afraid will be impossible - its in the nature of mothers.

It depends on how soon it will be before your mother is up and about fully, if it will be in the next week or so then she can tell her mother 'after the event' type thing, if the recovery is going to take a lot of time then I would suggest that a phone call from your mother combined with a visit from a relative would be a good way to stop her worrying too much.

Hope all mends soon.

Mel

Best wishes to mother Desk from me too.

Ditto.

Add my wishes for a speedy recovery too.
SBE

Someone rang at about 11:25pm but I still wasn't back from London. It was an international call, but they left no message on the answerphone. This kind of implies to me that everything is going OK.

Just to give you all an update, everything seems to be well on the way to full recovery.

The first long phone call I had with Mum was a bit strange, in as much as her speech pattern seemed straight out of the 1950s. This I guess is one of the novelties that can happen when you get bang to the head, everything gets a bit mixed up for a while. But now everything speech-wise is back to normal - ie she's speaking with a perfect cut glass RP accent despite living in Canada for the last 15 years.

Of her other injuries, the shoulder is healing nicely if a little twisted, but that is pretty common with a broken collar bone. The bruising is clearing up and she can now get around the house doing stuff pretty much as normal, provided that she takes plenty of little breaks.

As to driving in the future, we are still not sure what the position is going to be. Obviously her car was totalled in the crash, so from now on she's going to have to use the Subaru Imprezza (*) which she is not used to driving. There is also the issue of fault in the accident, she was the one to blame, and there may be charges of careless driving to answer. Not I think a license losing offence, but a pain in the arse and an impact on future insurance premiums.

Looking to the longer term, I think the time has come that she no longer hires a car straight from Heathrow airport and goes hammering off around the M25/M4 (**). I believe it is now time that her son collects her from the airport, and the car hire business is conducted in a more leisurely fashion later that day from a dealership in Brighton.




(*) Believe it or not, the Imprezza is sold as a car for the older generation in Canada. The same marque, but not necessarily the same model, is sold in the UK as a cheap muscle car for the 30 year old boy racer market. Very strange

(**) I've always been quite impressed that she can get off of an overnight flight from across the ocean and straight into a car, and then face English motorway traffic. Driving on what, in effect is now the wrong side of the road for her. It is not something that I would particularly fancy doing, and I'm thirty years younger than her.

Glad to hear all is healing well.

I think I agree with you about being picked up from the airport

Mel