Staying Lucky

We were one car away from a major shunt on the highway coming back to Singapore this afternoon. Noi wasn't with us - she's staying at the Melaka house to help ease things back to normality for a couple of days. I was giving a lift to Hakim & Intan and Kak Kiah's brother and they were all a bit startled, as was I, when three or four cars ahead of us in the outside lane decided to push into each other in what seemed like slow motion in the grey rain a few kilometres beyond Machap. They ended up strewn across the two lanes of the highway whilst we managed to draw to a reasonably elegantly unhurried halt behind a chap who also kept a good distance between himself and the mess in front. The guy behind us had also had the sense to keep a sensible distance so that was the end of the carnage.

I don't think anyone was badly hurt, it was all too slow for that, but obviously there was going to be plenty of business for the car repair services in the area. Just how much we only realised as we rounded the blockage, which was quite easy for us being so close so there no queue to speak of, and suddenly realised that what we had witnessed was just the back end of a much longer shunt. I'd guess it involved a further twelve cars at least. The thing none of us could quite grasp was what had happened to the car right at the front, a red one, that meant everyone ploughing into him.

So it's appropriate to be thankful I'm back here in one piece and life can get on without enormous disruptions of one sort or another. I mention this in the awkward knowledge that it sounds a bit like crowing over the misfortunes of all those involved in the mess on the highway. Any celebration of good fortune can sound that way, and some can be meant that way. But I'm trying to mean mine as a genuine recognition that just being able to keep things going in a routine manner is an enormous blessing that we, well me at least, are apt to overlook.