Oops upside your head

I said oops upside your head, oops upside your head. -- The Gap Band, 1979

Bean in a field in summer

Life's like this: You're driving along listening to "The Hustle" (to which, I have to let you know, my ex-husband learned how to do at Beverly Hills High School on a rainy day sports period, another reason I'm jealous I didn't have a California education) and watching the freakily huge and mesmerizingly gorgeous hailstorm depositing buckets of small white frozen balls onto the road, and marvelling at the beauty of it all, passing a lorry, and a couple of people walking, standing on the side of the road and waving as you drive slowly past, and the next you've been hit by a car going about 50 mph that has slid on black hail-ice and is shunting you across the road and on to the grass verge. It's intense, actually, but there is this moment when you notice something blue and fast moving out of the corner of your right eye and then suddenly the world slows down and you're watching in slo-mo as the car comes closer and closer and closer. And for a moment you are utterly, beautifully speechless, completely calm and you feel nothing but peace and contentment, almost the way you see heroin addicts depicted on screen. I think I am writing this to tell you that guardian angels are absolutely and without question a thing. A real, and serious thing, and that they are there with you, lifting you, gently lifting you through the slomo and the underwater soundtrack, so that you are no longer in time, you are pulled through a little rip in the space time continuum, on a soft soft cushion where you are cosseted, gently, velvetly, as if in warm saltwater, but better. There is softness and quiet and a sense of pure calm just before you hear your own voice say "Oh fuck, someone hit me." When I was small, my brother and I believed that we flew downstairs. We would lift off the ground with just the tiniest touch of a foot to the floor, and we'd float to the next landing before touching off again, down three soft layers of stairs to the hall. It was effortless, easy, un-rehearsed, and just like this. A softness of protection surrounds you.

The policewoman rang and told me that my phone had called in the crash. I'd just staggered out of the door, underneath the airbag. Perhaps the door had opened in the crash, I don't know. I just know I couldn't get back in that way when I tried. I must have been slightly in shock. "The hail just started out of the blue and then the whole road was covered in it," I said to her. "Oh I know," she said, "we had dozens of calls of crashes all at the same time as yours." So, just like that, or just like something out of "Magnolia" the sky opened a crack and the earth went off its axis just long enough to let a cloud release a mountain of hail onto a little country road in rural Oxfordshire, just long enough for scores of cars to lose control and spin out, and smack against each other, and then seal up again in a matter of minutes, with no visible sign of inclement weather. There's a disaster film too (we disagree; Charlie actually thinks it's a scene from "Carnal Knowledge" with white cars) where a bunch of Teslas are programmed to smash into each other one by one. It felt like that. It felt as if the laws of nature weren't working for a moment. It was mayhem but it was okay. As if you'd just given up control of everything. As if your ego, your little self, had stopped trying.

The woman in the other car was holding her head and pacing and repeating "I'm so stupid, I'm so stupid." Poor woman. It seemed like a grief response. She had blonde hair and a navy blue parker with a fur collar, but it was unzipped. My fingers were fiddling with my phone which didn't seem to be working. I was wet from riding and cold from standing outside and colder and shaking from shock. But, extraordinarily, we both seemed okay. No broken bones, or blood, but I'm reminded off falls from horses and adrenaline is a powerful drug. I hugged her. Hard. And then I sat in my car with the heat on to get warm, but the heat wasn't working. It was blowing cold onto my already frozen legs in their wet breeches.  I found two dog blankets in the back and wrapped myself up in them. I wished I'd left some polos in the car. And then I texted "I'm okay" to Ned and Honor who'd gotten emergency contact texts. Somehow I got it together to video where the cars were and the skid marks on the road in the melting hail. I'd travelled. As they say.

The police and the ambulance teams were amazing. I had a full MOT and despite a stretched trapeze muscle, a sore neck and a bit of whiplash, there wasn't much wrong.  I said "I feel a bit hypoglycemic" and she didn't know what I meant so maybe I was using the word wrongly. Brain all over the place. "Do you have any pets?" she said as she shone a torch into my eyes to test for concussion. She pricked my finger. "Your sugars are good." I was dying for a warm cup of sweet tea and a biscuit. Isn't that why people give blood? Sweet tea on a grey day in the back of an ambulance on the verge of the A4074. Heaven.

But I can't shake this feeling that someone is watching over, that someone is watching over all of us. That we each have our specialized team of super-duper on-it angels, just guiding us. I heard somewhere that there have been 144 generations before us, and if you think about that; that you're carrying all of those generations with you and they're all there to wish you well in the world. That hand on your back which is always there, pushing you gently in the right direction, that's many, many people, all of whom have your best interest at heart. It makes me cry thinking of that. I'm thinking of my grandmother and her mother, who I didn't know because she died when I was very little, and all the Scandinavian women, and how we're all pushing each other along with those warm, strong hands on our backs.

I woke up the next morning at 3am and grabbed my journal and by the light of my phone I wrote: "This is a wake up call. Go inward. This is the Universe smacking me upside my head the only way it knows how." A little like when you're high, you do think you sound rather profound in those liminal spaces between sleep and waking. But, you know, go inward indeed. Spend some time alone, in the quiet, without any interruption, without the clutter. Create some spaciousness, just you and your angels. Remember why you're here. Remember the thing that you forget every day and have to re-member. It's something to do with purpose and why we're here (it's so close I can almost touch it sometimes, and other times I'm on my tiptoes on a chair reaching up to the stars to grasp it.)