Jt wasn’t supposed to end like this. In the cinema of my mind, I saw it very differently – a mighty V8 Jaguar comes to a halt. Rugged, good looking man (myself obviously), removes Ray Bans, eyes screwed against the low sun, one last check in the rearview mirror, a blip on the loud pedal, one last snarl from that mighty V8 then silence. Pan across the valley to the familiar shape of Neuschwanstein castle as the music swells – “The Entry of the Gods into Valhalla” by Richard Wagner. Closing credits roll as the music thunders to conclusion. Screen fades to black.
That sort of thing.
Epic, heroic and melodramatic all in one. Pete and l had discussed the idea a year or so back when it looked as though I was going to lose my driving licence. A series of narrative conversations about Parkinson’s, linked together by a journey through the various Wagnerian castles. Thoughts by Pete and Jon, music by Wagner. What’s not to like.
But somehow events rarely unfold so tidily. Like a friend who was looking for spiritual enlightenment at the top of Kilimanjaro at dawn only to find her moment of quiet reflection brought to an abrupt halt by four Dutch teenagers intent on mooning her until she left the mountaintop. Fatuous trumps heroic every time.
In my case, there was no Jaguar. No Wagner. No sunset. Just a momentary lapse of concentration approaching a sharp right-left corner in an this ageing Nissan Micra. A screech of tyres, and an abrupt admonishing yelp from my passenger as we left the road, crashed through brush and bushes, coming eventually to rest with that familiar sound of headlamp meeting tree trunk. A cause for celebration with hindsight although it did not seem so at the time (to the right of the tree trunk was a steep ravine, sliding into which would almost certainly have rolled the car).
No Wagner. No Jaguar. No roaring V8. No music at all.
So this is how it ends, I thought.
I know of no male who would ever volunteer the opinion that they were anything less than a god behind the wheel. It’s a machismo sort of thing I think, some DNA relic from our Neanderthal background. Let me break with tradition then and vouch the opinion, endorsed by my friends and anyone who has ever been driven by me, that my own driving is perhaps not the very zenith of automotive control. Put another way, and I have the Parkinson’s at least partly to blame, I am probably not a very good driver. I am the counterfoil.
As my passenger and I collected our thoughts and dusted ourselves down, we counted ourselves lucky. He could have shouted. He would have been within his rights to be angry. Or worried or fearful. He has known me for more than fifty years. He did not need to say anything. We both knew what this meant.
Given time I could have persuaded myself that it was just a one-off, an accident that would not be repeated. But I have a strong imagination and can easily deconstruct any event into a series of what-ifs. What if I had hit a person rather than a tree. What if the car had caught fire after the collision? What if? What if? What if?
It doesn’t matter how long you delude yourself that it will be okay, eventually it won’t. I picked my driving licence from the bureau, placed it in a Manila envelope with a brief covering letter and sent it to the DVLA.
It was not to a soundtrack of Wagner. It was not heroic. Nor noble. Just prosaic. The only thing I could have done. At least it didn’t end in Valhalla.