Are you a disaster waiting to happen?

Or just waiting for a disaster to happen?

I’m the latter. Yesterday I drove three hours through the high country, from the big (ish) smoke to my bush home, and all the way I was thinking…

‘A woman died tonight in a horrific car crash on the Snowy Mountains Highway…police believe that she slid on black ice/hit a kangaroo/went to sleep/was the victim of a reckless driver on the wrong side of the road…’

Sure, every time you get in your car you have more chance of dying than getting married, or something like that, but this is ridiculous. I used to be a good ice-skater. Natural balance, inborn grace…and one hell of an imagination. What if I fall over, I’d mull as I glid (is that a verb?) around the rink? What if I sprawl full-length on the ice and some teenager with razor sharp blades slices off my wedding ring finger? What if I do a splat while attempting to skate backwards and erase all my childhood memories in one fatal crunch? What if…

Then there’s snakes (a woman was found floating in her dam yesterday, apparently savaged by a rogue tiger snake…), chainsaws (‘Farewell, my children, as I lie bleeding here in the bush I think only of you…), and axe murderers (‘the house was like a scene from Psycho…’). Not to mention vampires. ‘She didn’t believe in vampires, and neither did we on Sixty Minutes…but what other explanation is there for the horrific scene we encountered when…’

Having an imagination is a bit of a bummer. As you’d guess, thrill rides are not for me. Climbing, canoeing rapids, surfing, jumping into water from any kind of height…no. On the other hand, some of my worst moments have come from NOT being able to imagine…

that getting into a canoe with my baby daughter just above a weir wasn’t a good idea (she survived)
that small children and automatic sliding doors don’t mix (he survived too)
that untidy as live electrical wires sometimes are, you shouldn’t try to cut them with a pair of scissors (I survived. There was a circuit breaker.).

Anyway, back to the drive home. I got a flat on the highway and ended up having to drive home in the dark at speeds slightly above walking pace, peering at the road for signs of black ice, scanning the perimeter for marsupials with a death wish, and generally driving the occasional person behind me completely nuts.

Have you ever done anything stupid? Or is your imagination better than mine?

Ps: if you’re into thrillers, I’m giving away not one but two trilogies (six books!). My just-released trilogy, Like Flies, and K.F.Breene’s darkly funny Fire and Ice. Enter here.