by Nathan Hook

Created on: January 28, 2009

A few years ago as I was re-watching a favorite child hood science fiction TV series, I caught a line about death being, "the one talent we all share." It made me chuckle and still does, but then of course, I am not in danger of dying immediately as far as I know. For those of us who still possess a reasonably robust constitution, death is not something you ponder regularly, or actively avoid as a conscious act. Rather, despite being surrounded by plenty of examples of death at work, we generally take our fragile life for granted. Death operates on its' own time frame and tends to sneak up on you, whether you're ready or not.

Strangely, there are those calling cards, those near death experiences as some people call them, where death makes brief courtesy calls before paying you a permanent visit. Most of us have experienced them, or several of them, in a life time. I recall my foster sister coaching me across an intersection in that strange no-mans land between changes in the light sequence. She called me to cross from the other side of the street. The peripheral vision of a five year old is all but useless, so trust was placed in the older sister who was barely a teenager herself. I heard the roar of an engine, the squeal of tires and saw the white hood of a Ford Anglia, whose mass, effortlessly flung me onto my sprawling hands. The hot road baked in the afternoon sun, skinned my palms and knees. I escaped being run over and left the scene with bruises and a fear for crossing roads that was to last for years to come.

Only recently while traversing an intersection, a left turn on green, and my wife at the wheel, something made me look to the right. A black Mitsubishi Eclipse, I gauged correctly, was not going to stop for the red light it had. My wife admits that the blas way in which I announced, "Watch out for this guy," pointing a finger, was almost as unnerving as the speeding Eclipse which ripped through the intersection within feet of us. Perhaps as the driver she felt it more, and as she noted, a few feet more and I would have taken the full force of the side on impact. Now, any reckless maneuver we see on the road is oft accompanied with the "Watch out for this guy [gal]" remark. These small events, however, pale into insignificance compared to another more frightening experience which occurred to me many years earlier.

It was one of those school trips at primary school, where a hundred of us were bundled into a bus and hauled, on a wet winter's day, into

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