I have a very simple morning routine.  I leave home at 6.30a.m. to do the school run; on the way, my daughter and I look at the Johannesburg skies, we play music too loudly, we count birds in the sky, and dogs in the gardens we pass by.  Following school drop off, I head down to my favourite coffee shop, get a take-out café au lait, and drive the now mere two minutes to work – a job which I love.  I am lucky.

I try not to feel downtrodden that we live far away from school, but rather think thoughts like “the early bird catches the worm” as I look at the skyline and appreciate living in a great city, with great friends, with a healthy family – in other words, it is all good.

I heard the saying recently – “Terrific Tuesday”, so yesterday morning I awoke, and thought to myself “today is going to be a Terrific Tuesday”.  The early routine passed without incident, until it didn’t.

Driving along the road my work is in, at a fairly slow pace as I am an over cautious driver, out of nowhere, came the Wicked Witch of the East (as she was heading in an Easterly direction, of course) – a black car, traveling at pace, that went straight through a stop street.  The experience, I have to say, was surreal.  I saw the situation, I knew I was going to crash, I knew I had nowhere to go, I did not know what to expect next, but I did know that I had to stay focused.  My life flashed before me very quickly, but was replaced, equally as quickly, with a strange sense of calm.

I don’t recall at all swerving to avoid the oncoming Wicked, which must have been my instinct, but I recall very clearly seeing the stationary car I was going to hit, and I think I will forever remember the sound of the impact.  By then, I knew that I was not going to die, I knew I was in one of the safest cars on the road, but I knew too that my beautiful, albeit old, car, was about to be a crumpled wreck.  Astonishingly, every single item of the previous sentence is acutely correct.

The next few minutes are a blur, other than looking down at my white dress and realizing that the delicious coffee I had just picked up had left my center console and landed squarely on my lap.  A woman came running up to my car and told me to get out of it immediately as there was steam everywhere, and liquid everywhere else, and she was scared it was going to catch on fire.

I climbed out, I looked at the car I had hit; I looked at the Wicked Witch car, I looked to my right, and there was a tow truck, ready and waiting.

I have realized in the last thirty six hours that life really is a funny old thing.  I have been conditioned to believe that those tow truck drivers are scum bags, low lives and drug-taking hooligans.  I have to say, my experience could not have been more different.  Whilst they did indeed gather around this damsel in distress in record time, they called my insurance company for me, they moved my car out of a corner driveway for me, they called the police and the very lovely medic, in fact, they organized that accident scene with extreme precision. 

The next few hours are irrelevant, and are, I am sure, the same in any accident… but as we all know, I live my life looking for the message in everything, and I have spent every waking moment trying to work out what exactly it is.

After all this thought, the shock, the aftershock, the admin required to sort out the repair, and of course, the glasses of vino I simply had to have last evening to calm my battered nerves, I have come to my conclusion:  Judge not a tow truck by its signage; judge not a stop sign by its red and white painted façade; expect the unexpected; be thankful for friendly medics, but be thankful more so for safe German cars and the absolute knowing that as of yesterday, and indeed today, so far, my number is clearly not up.  Despite everything, in a strange way, it was still… a “Terrific Tuesday”.

P.S.  In case you were wondering… no-one was seriously injured in the accident, including the Wicked Witch of the East, last seen flying on her broomstick somewhere near Rosebank.