Some days I wonder why I bothered to get out of bed. I'm sure you're the same. (You wonder about yourself, that is. If you wondered about me, I'd be slightly disturbed.)
This morning I decided to have some of my homemade muesli for breakfast. Not a momentous decision, I think you'll agree. Not one that was likely to cause widespread havoc.
I took the container out of the pantry cupboard. As often happens, the contents had settled into strata. So I shook them up. But the lid wasn't on properly ...
Having wasted a portion of the morning sweeping up oats, slivered almonds and small cubes of sticky dried fruit, I thought it was about time I went to work. Apart from the odd nutter hurtling out of the hospital with a body in the back of the van*, the trip is usually uneventful. Not today. A nutter—who probably didn't have a dead body in the vehicle (it was a ute)—hurtled out of the hospital, causing the traffic to brake heavily.
I'd left plenty of room between my car and the one in front. No worries. But I'd forgotten about the collection of golf balls on the back seat. (That's another story.) Twenty-eight bright yellow balls followed the laws of momentum. It was like sitting in the middle of the Lotto machine.
By this time, the traffic had started moving again. I had nowhere to pull over. But there were more than two dozen golf balls rolling around in the foot well. What if they got stuck under the brake pedal? Now I was on a main road. Still no chance to pull over. All I could think of doing was using the newspaper, which was still in its plastic wrapper, to dam the flow. I slid The Age under the seat and held it in place with my left foot. Thank goodness for automatics.
So if you're hitchhiking and a 40-year-old woman in a dusty white Daewoo stops to give you a lift, you know what to say.
________
*Okay, it happened once.
