Life in the fast lane

Just when I thought things were looking up, I figured I was safe to go out of the house heading somewhere other than work this weekend. So I spent the better part of yesterday doing the rounds of various fabric outlets, spending far more than I should have on some beautiful materials which will someday be turned into something equally beautiful. As if lugging a couple of hundred dollars worth of stuff around wasn't enough to test my back out, I decided to really push my luck and play with my niece.

She's two, but she's about the size of the average four year old, a mini giant who will one day be a seriously tall one. Imagine a slightly less coherent but far more opinionated Dora the Explorer, and you're getting pretty close to the hyperactive bundle of energy that my brother helped bring into this world. Ever the optimist, I thought I'd be able to manage some of our usual games - the catch and spin, the whizzy dizzy, the throw over the shoulder, the threaten to throw in the bin. It was only the last one that made me certain it probably wasn't one of my better ideas. But there's no easy way out when your arms are full of squirming, shrieking little girl and you're standing on concrete. Not like the moment when you first began to doubt your own wisdom and simply made it more fun by dropping her on the conveniently located bed.

Not content with that, I headed out and about today, driving to various locations around town. The true lightening bolt moment of the day came as I was driving on the Ring Road, along one of the three lane stretches. Driving down the left lane, I noticed signs telling me to merge right. Checking the mirrors, I waited for a speeding car to pass me, then moved over at about the same time as the car in front of me pulled in front of the speeder. Funny, it was kind of like it happens in the movies - slow motion, obvious what the next step would be at every stage. Rather than braking, the speeder began to shift into the right lane. They didn't check their mirrors, or look out their window, even, and didn't see the car that was already in that lane until it was almost too late. With bare millimetres between the two cars, they both suddenly became aware of what was going on. The car already in the right lane swerved a little away, but the speeder, as they had done all along, completely over reacted. Braking hard and wrenching left, the driver lost control of their car. Smoke was screaming from the locked wheels as they skidded and spun across my lane and the left lane which had not yet ended. By the time they reached the emergency lane, they were facing the wrong way and started to cross back into the left lane before coming to a stop, at last.

You can imagine what braking from 100 in a hurry did to my back. Even the adrenaline kick from being so close to potential serious danger didn't stop it hurting as I watched the speeder once again getting back up to and then beyond the speed limit. The few things that I had to get at the supermarket were almost the end of me, or that's how it felt. I've been back in the horizontal position on the couch again since I got home. The pinging sensation that I felt when I got up earlier tonight make me think I'm still going to be sore tomorrow. The cars avoided damage, but I apparently did not. The car that had sparked all the drama in the first place probably hadn't even noticed what was going on, disappearing around a bend before the speeder had even finished spinning.

A Little Bit of Something

It happened again this morning. I was running late. That’s not what happened again, it seems to happen pretty much every morning, so I hardly ever comment on it these days. No, it was while I was bustling to the tube that it happened. A short anorexic girl out for a jog went by me and nearly took me out.

I’m not small. In fact, there is no dimension attached to me that could possibly be classed as small, except for my attention span, which is too tiny to measure. I shouldn’t be difficult to see coming. I was wearing a blue coat and a pink/purple/blue striped hat. I have big hair. I should have been clearly visible, especially from behind. I wasn’t walking up the middle of the footpath, but, rather considerately, I thought, was off to one side. There was nobody coming the other way. But still Little Miss These-Lycra-Leggings-Are-Flapping-Loose-At-My-Bum felt it necessary to try to cut between me and the brick wall I was walking beside, and in the process nearly overturned me. And it’s the second day in a row she’s done it. Being bumped into by her is like having a bag of rulers thrown at your back; she’s all sharp angles with, quite literally, no padding. The only reason she didn’t end up on her arse herself was that there was nothing of her to bounce off me. Kind of like a feather doesn’t really bounce off things as it falls to the ground, it just slightly alters its course, she was able to keep her feet.

But aggressive vertically challenged folk have been out in force of late. Last night I had one standing so close behind me on an escalator that her face must have been getting hit by the bag I had slung over my shoulder. Every time she breathed, I could feel some part of her against my thighs. She would have climbed the stairs, I’m sure, but for the stream of other midgets passing on the left. One of these bolted past at such speed that I was nearly sucked into her slipstream as I stepped off the top. I watched her weave through the crowd when I was caught in a lull, waiting for some moron to find their oyster card while they were at the gates. I couldn’t see her, she was too low down, but I could see the ripple of consternation her passing caused like wind through a field of wheat. It was around about then that I put together my theory about why shorter people are often so much more aggressive in crowd situations than taller ones. The taller ones can see the impact their movement has on the people around them. They can often see that by jostling the person next to them, they bump them into another person, and the contact travels like a wave out from the source. Shorties, on the other hand, barrel through hordes of people only able to see the ones they elbow out of the way – and sometimes it seems that they don’t even see them – until somewhere, Ashton Kutcher blacks out or a there's a hurricane in Texas. I think it’s time I tested out my own version of the butterfly effect though; the next stunted excuse for an adult who sideswipes me and nearly knocks me over because they hit me below my centre of gravity? Yeah, I might just land on them. We’ll see what that does to the butterfly.

*Apologies to all my short friends. You know I don’t mean you. None of you have knocked me over yet. But be warned, if you do…