When I was a toddler, one day my mother told me to wait in the car while she went inside a drugstore on the other side of the road. Being three, I wasn't very good at being compliant, so as soon as she was out of sight, I got out of the car and went after her. My mother later told me she'd heard the screeching of tires and the clonking of a little wooden shoe on the street. She'd instantly known it was me. I had been run over by a VW van. I broke a leg, my collarbone and had a severe concussion. In return, I had broken the van's headlight with my elbow - hence the broken collarbone, probably. I don't know what the chances of a three-year-old against a van are, but I reckon I could have met an untimely end that day. I have hardly any memory of the accident, so I cannot say what went through me at the time.
Later, when I was a student, I took up motorcycle lessons because I reckoned I couldn't afford a car, but a secondhand motorcycle might be within my reach. During the first few lessons, the instructor would sit behind me, but soon I was on my own and he drove behind me in a car. We used headsets for contact. We, the instructor, another student and me, drove to a city nearby, with me up front because I was supposed to be the more experienced.
It soon became painfully clear how completely INexperienced I was. We were in a long curve and I was driving too close behind a military jeep. I could hardly see through it, but I had seen that something big was coming from the opposite direction. So I steered slightly to the centre of the road, in order to be able to look past the jeep. What I hadn't seen was that the big thing approaching - a giant truck used for hauling army tanks - was preceded by a policeman on a motorcycle who was driving just on our side of the line, with warning lights flashing, to get the traffic on our side to move to the right.
He was already very near when I first saw him and in a reflex I braked rather abruptly with the front brake. Because I was hanging to the left a bit (to look around the jeep), the braking caused my front wheel to slip from under me and the bike and I parted company. The bike slid to a safe position to the right side of the road, while I tumbled forward in the middle of the road, straight into the path of that enormous truck, which had sixteen wheels, giving me an equal number of opportunities to become a sticky streak of jelly on the tarmac.
Luckily, the man behind the wheel managed to miss me by a metre or so, stripping about fifty metres of grass from the soft shoulder on his side of the road. My instructor later told me that when he saw me rolling towards that truck, he'd thought that I was done for. Because everything went so quickly, I don't remember thinking anything while tumbling on that road. The policeman advised me to take another lesson the next day, otherwise I might never dare to ride a motorcycle again. I did as I he told me.
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