Sunday, January 11, 2009

Scooter vs. Bus.


The photo above was taken by me through my living room window on Monday evening. The first that I knew something bad had happened was as I came downstairs from my home office to get a drink (most of you know that I work from home on weekday evenings). Unusually I could not hear any traffic noise coming from the road - my house is on a busy main road which has a lot of noisy commercial traffic travelling on it. I also saw red and blue flashing lights coming through the frosted glass panel in the middle of my front door. I turned the living room lights off and peeked through the front window. A police cordon stretched all of the way along the road outside my block of houses, and directly outside of my front gate were a number of traffic cops and two ambulance crews with para medics. They were working on a young guy of no more than 20, who looked to be in a very sorry state. He had been riding a motor scooter and had had a contretemps with a 469 single decker bus. The medics spent over an hour trying to stabilise the unfortunate scooterist, and eventually an ambulance took him off to hospital, strapped to a body board and head brace; I noticed that although they had the blue flashing lights working, they did not use the siren, or indeed make any kind of haste, they just trundled off at a sedate pace.

Once the immediate medical emergency had been handled, I popped on a coat and went out to speak to one of the traffic cops, who was measuring skid marks and bits of broken metal and plastic. I asked him about the condition of the victim, and the copper said "Serious head injury - I think they will be able to keep him alive long enough to get his parents there". Nasty. This happened at around 6.30, and the road finally re-opened at just before 10pm, when the forensics and accident investigators had completed their work. What really annoyed the emergency services, was that a gang of around 20 Chavs from the nearby estate turned up, not to see who had been hurt, or offer any kind of assistance, but merely to shout abuse at the police and paramedics. They were also filming the unfortunate victim with their mobile telephones. Incidentally, I made the decision not to take any photos of the accident victim, or the crew working on him; at the time I felt that he was quite probably in the process of kicking the bucket, and it did not seem appropriate. The local low lives had no such qualms and were treating the whole thing like a piece of street theatre. A burly traffic cop approached the scumbags and threatened to nick the lot of them - only then did the scrawny parasites deign to disperse. It is ironic that it is quite likely the victim was local, and could well have been known to some of the crowd.

The photo at the top of this entry shows a PCSO putting various pieces of clothing and other detritus from the accident into evidence bags shortly before the road was re - opened. Strangely, there has been no mention of the incident in the News Shopper, which is a bit of a surprise. The other novelty was that for an hour or so, my place felt like a Happy Shopper version of number 10 Downing Street - as I had my own police officer standing at the end of my garden path.

Talking of politics; I got the complete Yes Minister, and Yes Prime Minister boxed set of DVD's for Christmas. I am about a third of the way through watching this excellent, award winning comedy series. This weeks' video clip is short and sweet, and is taken from the show. Britain's newspaper brands, and who reads them - a pithy analysis. Watch below and enjoy.


1 comment:

  1. Oh dear, another dead Chav removed from the gene pool ! Mr. P, don't
    worry too much about the death of an 'alledgelly' piece of scum, it's one less problem for the local Police to worry about !

    You will have lots of flowers, cards and Teddy Bears out side of your QTH which will tell the tail of how wonderful this 'Youth' was and what a bright future he had (all bo**ocks of course) ! Good riddance to bad rubish, I say.

    Another member of Tony Blair's generation has been snuffed out, thank heavens :>)
    Was he a'Hoodie' ??... I hope so.

    Mr. AW

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