Careering

Leaving the office on Thursday I saw a note tucked under the windscreen wiper. A van driver had scratched my car door (and also I noticed my wing mirror) and left me details of her vehicle and contact details for the company. The company was EnhanceAble; perhaps more accurately a charity providing social care for disabled people. I felt a bit guilty about putting the bite on them for my repairs after that especially after speaking to them on the phone but I console myself that the matter will be handled by our insurance companies as opposed to our own bank accounts.

Anyway it has put me in mind of a story; maybe one we can share with mum over Skype at half past ten. Long enough ago for my youngest brother to be driving but still living at home, he had a minor knock of a morning, exchanged details with the driver of the other car and thought no more about it until got home and met my mother that is. (I like to think of her with her arms folded across her chest, her right foot tapping, and the dreaded Death-Star death-stare laser-beaming from her eyes.)

Apparently she had answered the door in the afternoon to find a tearful pregnant woman with a further child in a push chair on her doorstep. This was the wife of the tradesman whose van had bumped John's car. After a few hard years it seems, they were just getting back on the straight and narrow and the repercussions of this incident were likely to plunge them back into penury and despair.

You might as well have told mum that John had stuck up a post office wielding a chewed off shotgun with once of her old stockings pulled over his head as a mask.

I think it reflects well on her now I come to think of it all these years later. But then again it wasn't me who had to put my hand in my pocket.