I was at a wedding at the weekend. It was a top wedding (and if I'm being honest, I'm not a big fan of weddings) more like an awesome party with free beer and a silent disco. But the wedding was not the main event of the weekend.
The other half and I had hired a car for the weekend. We left London on Friday night and travelled to Swindon (our hotel was about 20 miles from the wedding venue). The wedding itself was on Saturday and we drove home on Sunday. Shortly after getting on the M4 at Swindon I was daydreaming and Rina was driving when she slammed on the breaks and said "Oh my God, they've gone right over. Phone the emergency services". Suffice to say that snapped me out of my reverie. I looked up and all I could see was a lonely tyre rolling away ahead of us. We pulled onto the hard-shoulder and Rina pointed up onto the verge beside us. There was a car and it was on its side. The car had suffered a blown-out tyre, had flipped in the air and rolled up a 6 foot verge before coming to rest on its side against a fence.
I jumped out of the car and up the verge. Other cars had pulled over by now, but I was the first person at the car. The front was crumpled and the side windows had blown out. The way the car sat, my view was of the car from above. I could see the roof and the bonnet, but not into the car. Looking at the distance the car had travelled and the damage it had sustained on the way I ran up to it expecting to find some very seriously injured people.
As I got to the car a head popped up out of the driver's door window. It was the girl who had been driving. She was able to climb out through the window, so me and another guy who had arrived by now helped her down. I looked in through the windscreen to see a shocked, but in one piece, passenger. The girl's partner. We asked if he could move, he could and climbed out of the window. We all walked down to the hard-shoulder where they sat down and started to come to terms with what had happened.
The police arrived and we left, heading back home.
On refection those guys should be feeling very grateful this morning. The fact that they both walked away from that crash is little short of a miracle. I was fairly sure, approaching the car, I was going to see some very hurt people. It seemed like they suffered little more that some bruises (and considerable shock).
What I try not to think about is that if a different tyre had blown that car would have flipped in a different direction - towards the middle of the motorway and towards us.
Yesterday was definitely someone's lucky day.
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