Getting cross at crossings

There are pedestrian crossings all over the place in São Paulo, but in all their various formats, the car remains king. Even when the crossing has traffic lights and a little green man sign to show that you are allowed the cross, there will often be a car or bus on the crossing making it difficult to get to the other side.

Until recently everyone just accepted this as the normal way things are. Then the State changed the rules and introduced penalties for:

1. Motorists who park on or block crossings with their vehicle when in traffic.
2. Motorists who don’t give priority to pedestrians at a crossing – basically you have to let people cross, they have the priority over cars now!

But the rules changed only recently so they are mostly ignored. Of course the most dangerous crossings are the ‘zebra’ ones where there are no lights, just black and white lines painted in the road. It annoys me when I go to one of these crossings and stand there watching car after car zoom past me ignoring the fact that I am supposed to have priority over them.

Recently a taxi nearly hit me when I stepped into a crossing expecting him to stop. The driver swore at me and fortunately I was carrying a large open carton of fresh mixed fruit juice. I chucked it at him and though I failed to get it through his window, it went all over the side of his car. He drove off.

And yesterday as I waited to cross, a pedestrian next to me was annoyed that the cars were not stopping, so he chucked a plastic bottle full of mineral water at a big SUV that was sailing past us. The car stopped and the driver didn’t know what to do – probably fearing some violent attack. He drove off.

I’m not advocating that pedestrians should be going armed, ready to launch juice at cars who don’t stop, but the frustration is getting unbearable. Who is actually getting fined for ignoring the rules because I’ve not heard about a single case yet – though I have heard about fatalities at pedestrian crossings, because people are now expecting the cars to stop.

Pedestrians are going to start taking the law into their own hands if motorists continue to ignore the new rules.

June 1 2012: British Pub Quiz at the Queens Head in São Paulo

***VEJA ABAIXO PARA VERSAO EM PORTUGUÊS***

The “pub quiz” is a tradition of British pubs. Over 22,000 different pub quiz events take place every week in the UK making it a common way to enjoy a pint – and possibly win a prize.
http://j.mp/pub-quiz… Mark and Tim are both British, both are married to Brazilian girls (the best, right?) and both live in São Paulo – and love a pub quiz! So they would like to invite you to come along to test your knowledge of the UK, win some great prizes and have some British style fun at the Queens Head pub in Pinheiros.The quiz takes place on the eve of the Diamond Jubilee of Queen Elizabeth II (60 years as Queen), a few months after the 200th birthday of Charles Dickens, and just a month before the London Olympic Games – there is a lot for the UK to celebrate in 2012!The quiz will include six rounds, each one focused on a specialist area, with ten questions in each round. You enter the quiz as a team (maximum 6) and stay in the same team all evening – you can win prizes for coming first in a round as well as winning the grand prize for the best total team score of all rounds together.

The tradition of British pub quizzes is that your team name is amusing, so think carefully about what you want to call your team – there might be a special prize for the best name on the night!

Each team can play one round during the evening as their “joker” round – meaning your points for this round will be doubled. You must announce in advance of the questions that this will be your joker round, so pick the round you expect to do best on!

The rounds will focus on these topics:
. Movies
. Books
. Music
. Sport
. God Save the Queen (Royal Family)
. UK in Brazil

The quiz will start at 20:00 with the first three rounds, then there will be a break for 20-30 mins followed by the next three rounds – it should be complete by 22:00. You can enter even if you miss a round, but it will affect your chances of winning the grand prize.

During each round there may also be a question using London ‘cockney” slang with a link to the round topic:
http://j.mp/cockneyslang

Points to remember:

1. No cheating. This is fun, remember? Any team using Google on their phone or calling a friend to get answers will be disqualified and asked to go to the boteco over the road. There is no need to cheat and you won’t go to Heaven if you do.

2. The questions will be inclusive and reflect the British culture that many Brazilians will be familiar with – so you don’t need to be a professor of British history to come and enjoy this quiz!

3. The questions will be asked by Mark and Tim in both English and Portuguese – you can answer in either language. So even if your English is not fluent, you can still enjoy the quiz.

We look forward to seeing you. Please indicate on this event that you plan to come, please pass on the invitation to your friends, and if you already know who will be in your team then please post your team details on the wall here! See you at the Queen’s Head!

Please sign up soon – there are only 75 seats available so we need to know the numbers of people and teams planning to come – thanks! The quiz will end at 2200 and live music will start at 2230 until late : )

Click here for the Facebook event page so you can sign up…

Mark Hillary, CEO, IT Decisions
http://www.itdecs.com/

Tim Lucas, CEO, The Listening Agency
http://www.thelisteningagency.com/

——-

O “pub quiz” é uma tradição dos pubs britânicos. Há mais de 22.000 eventos desse tipo todas as semanas no Reino Unido – é uma boa desculpa para se desfrutar uma cerveja – e, possivelmente, ganhar um prêmio. (http://j.mp/pub-quiz)

Mark e Tim são ambos britânicos, casados com mulheres brasileiras e vivem em São Paulo – e adoram um pub quiz! Agora os dois estão convidando vocês para testar o seu conhecimento da cultura popular da Inglaterra e do Brasil, concorrer a prêmios bem bacanas e se divertir à moda britânica no pub Queen’s Head em Pinheiros.

O quiz acontecerá às vésperas do aniversario da Rainha Elizabeth II de 60 anos no poder, poucos meses após o 200º aniversário de Charles Dickens, e apenas um mês antes do Jogos Olímpicos em Londres – há tantas coisas para o Reino Unido comemorar em 2012!

O quiz incluirá seis rodadas, cada uma focada em uma área especializada, com dez questões cada. Você pode participar como uma equipe (máximo 6 pessoas) ou simplesmente aparecer no pub e a gente acha um time para você. Haverão prêmios para a equipe que ganhar cada rodada e um prêmio maior para a equipe com a melhor pontuação de todas as rodadas.

A tradição do pub quiz britânico inclui escolher um nome engraçado para sua equipe, então comece a bolar um nome legal para a sua equipe – você e seus amigos podem ganhar um prêmio especial para o melhor nome da noite!

Cada equipe pode jogar uma rodada durante a noite como a sua rodada ‘especial’ (o “joker” ) – ou seja, os seus pontos para essa rodada vale o dobro. Você deve anunciar antecipadamente qual será a sua rodada escolhida.

As rodadas serão sobre os seguintes temas:

. Filmes
. Livros
. Música
. Esporte
. God Save the Queen (Família Real)
. Reino Unido no Brasil

O quiz começará às 20:00h com as três primeiras rodadas. Em seguida, haverá uma pausa de 20-30 minutos, seguida das três últimas rodadas – precisamos terminar às 22:00h.

Lembrando que você pode entrar depois do inicio do quiz, mas isso vai afetar suas chances de ganhar o grande prêmio.

Durante cada rodada pode haver também uma pergunta usando “gírias” inglesas vinculadas ao tópico da rodada: http://j.mp/cockneyslang

Pontos para lembrar:

1. Jogue Limpo! Isso é só diversão, lembra? Qualquer equipe que for flagrada usando o Google ou o celular para obter respostas será desclassificada.

2. Não precisa ser um expert sobre a cultura britânica. As perguntas
refletem a cultura britânica que muitos brasileiros conhecem – você
não precisa ser um professor de história da Inglaterra para entrar e
se divertir neste quiz!

3. As perguntas serão feitas por Mark e Tim em Inglês e Português -
você pode responder em qualquer idioma. Assim, mesmo se o seu Inglês não for fluente, você ainda pode participar do quiz.

Queremos ver vocês lá! Por favor, nos diga se você gostaria de
participar e, por favor, repasse o convite para os seus amigos. Se
você já sabe quem vai fazer parte de sua equipe, por favor poste os
detalhes aqui. See you in the Queen’s Head.

Reserve seu lugar! Há apenas 75 lugares disponíveis e precisamos também saber quantas pessoas/times estão planejando vir. O quiz terminará às 22.00 e a música ao vivo começará às 22.30 até tarde : )

Clique aqui para a página do Facebook

Mark Hillary, CEO, IT Decisions
http://www.itdecs.com/

Tim Lucas, CEO, The Listening Agency
http://www.thelisteningagency.com/

The failure of The Artist

Silent movie The Artist may have won five Oscars last night, including Best Picture, Best Director, and Best Actor, but in Brazil – a country of almost 200m people – only 144,840 people in 51 theatres have paid to watch it (HT to @brazzil for the stats).

This may seem like a terrific failure in the cultural taste of Brazilian movie-goers. Language is no excuse, because the film has almost no dialogue. Many are asking the question why so few in Brazil have been to see the movie.

But surely the answer is obvious?

Walk down any major street in urban Brazil and there will be a guy on the corner selling DVDs. The going rate is usually three movies for R$10. That’s about USD $2 a movie. Now check out how much it costs to go and watch a movie at the cinema. I looked just now at the cinema inside the Bourbon shopping centre in Pompeia, São Paulo for a ticket for Hugo tonight – normal tickets are R$40 each.

To be fair, this is an IMAX movie and therefore a little more than a regular presentation, but even so it is a real ticket price for a movie that is on right here in Brazil in a theatre tonight.

So even a person who is fairly honest and doesn’t like supporting DVD piracy has to compare R$40 to watch one movie in the theatre with R$10 to watch three on DVD – twelve movies for the price of one.

This problem is also compounded by the legitimate DVD market, which is like the legitimate cinema, just overpriced.

The public in Brazil have voted with their feet. Water cannot run uphill… if pirate movies are a twelfth of the cost of the legal version then who will pay the “correct” price. Only those who want the full cinema experience, those who refuse to support piracy at any price, and those who managed to get a date with a girl and know that a pirate DVD will not impress.

I still go to the cinema myself and I like the communal, inclusive experience… being surrounded by that big Dolby sound and hundreds of other people all watching the same movie, but I don’t watch every single movie in the theatre. I bought a pirate copy of The Artist – and it was watermarked as a DVD that came from the Academy Award judging process… so one of those judges allowed their DVD to leak and be copied for millions around the world to watch almost for free.

The real answer to piracy is not to go out arresting the guys selling DVDs on the street, it is to make the legitimate route to enjoying a movie easier than buying a pirate – and good value. At present there is no incentive for anyone to keep supporting cinema tickets and legitimate DVDs when they are priced so much higher than the pirates.

Of course the argument goes that if everyone bought pirate films the movie industry would collapse – which is nonsense. It would just move from a model funded by tickets and DVDs to product placement and sponsorship – a process that is already developing anyway. Morgan Spurlock financed an entire film this way in 2011.

Services like Netflix are offering Brazilians unlimited movies for R$15 a month. Of course it depends on having good broadband, and many people don’t have the technical ability to hook up a computer to a TV, but Internet-enabled TVs are standard today. As this latest generation of TVs rolls out with tools like Netflix built-in and on the remote control, it will be easy to click a button to get any movie from a library of millions – easier than going out and selecting from a limited range of pirate DVDs.

And this model is affordable too… that monthly charge is less than half the price of one ticket to see Hugo tonight at the cinema.

The recorded music industry is finally seeing this, with services such as Spotify taking off and killing the illegal copying of music because the legal route is so much easier. But it took years for the record companies to ever understand that they need a new business model – not more litigation. Let’s just hope the movie business doesn’t make all the same mistakes they did…

Photo by Donna Grayson licensed under Creative Commons

Which would you prefer… pancake day or carnaval?

In the Gospels, Jesus spent 40 days fasting in the desert and being tempted by Satan before he commenced on the teaching part of his life – the Ministry. Today in Christian societies this is marked by the celebration of Lent.

Lent begins on Ash Wednesday, which is Wednesday next week. Many believers will give up something for the entire period – not quite fasting, but at least refraining from something pleasurable, like alcohol or meat, for the entire period.

In the UK, the advent of Lent is marked by Shrove Tuesday, or pancake day. This is traditionally when extra flour, eggs, and other food from the cupboard would all be cooked up on the final day before Lent – ensuring a feast of pancakes on the last day when such gluttony is allowed.

In Brazil it is all quite different. Brazil is far more religious than the UK – truck drivers paint thank you messages to God on their vehicles, asking for a safe journey. It is predominantly Catholic, but with a fast-rising group of evangelical churches too – almost all of them Christian though.

In Brazil there is no pancake day. There is carnaval!

Last year in Rio, almost 5m people joined in the party and it stops the entire nation for almost a week – here in São Paulo, I know that sleeping will be tough for the next week as the music goes on almost all night. This Friday, next Monday and Tuesday, and half of Wednesday are all public holidays in Brazil for the carnaval. So it is almost certain that everything will start winding down early tomorrow and nobody will return to work on Wednesday afternoon – even if that is the official end of the party… many will take annual leave on Thursday and Friday next week allowing almost a week and half off work for just a couple of days leave.

Those who take the carnaval seriously and compete for the various best dancer, best float, or best band prizes will spend the entire year preparing and leading up to this moment – it’s bigger than even Christmas and that’s saying a lot in such a Christian country.

So I guess carnaval more than trumps pancake day, but I still might get the pancake mix out on Tuesday, just to encourage a mix of both cultures. I live in a house with Morrissey pictures on the wall!

Pancake photo by Yesica licensed under Creative Commons. Carnaval photo by Carnaval.com licensed under Creative Commons.

The life of an umbrella

Being British I know how useful it can be to have an umbrella in your bag, and though Brazil is a lot hotter than England, São Paulo in the summer gets a lot of tropical rain – it may be warmer, but it is just as wet.

For years I had always purchased umbrellas in an emergency. It rained, I wasn’t carrying one, so I would dive into any shop selling them and grab one – usually at a price that had doubled the instant it started raining. But these emergency umbrellas were never all that good.

So the last time I was in London, I invested over £70 in a nice solid German umbrella with a lovely wooden handle at Smith’s – the store near the British museum that has been selling umbrellas for over 100 years.

It was great, the best umbrella I have ever had, but on Tuesday I was on my way out and checked the umbrella basket on my porch only to find it had been snatched – someone had reached into the porch at the front of my house to steal my umbrella! It was pouring, so I had to grab my wife’s ‘London 2012‘ umbrella and use that to get to my meeting – a very masculine shade of pink…

When my taxi arrived at the meeting venue, I left the London 2012 umbrella in the back of the car – so I had my umbrella stolen and I lost one soon after. My wife bought me a cheap black one the next day just in case I lose it again.

The thing that is really annoying is that the opportunist who stole my umbrella, just because it was raining, probably has no idea that they have a handmade European umbrella costing about 15 times (over R$200 for an umbrella is outrageous) what a regular umbrella in Brazil would cost. At least I had an appreciation of it every time I used it and remembered visiting Smith’s and choosing that particular one.

It’s a good thing I am visiting London again next week. I’ll replace the London 2012 umbrella, but I’m undecided about getting another expensive one. If I bring it back to Brazil with me, I might leave it in the taxi from the airport…

Feeling safe in Brazil

One thing that people from the UK often ask me is whether it is safe to live in Brazil. The image most foreigners have of living here is of the favelas… in particular the international success of the film City of God didn’t help very much.

At face value, the crime statistics are much higher than Britain and the police in São Paulo alone shoot someone dead everyday, but on a day-today basis I don’t feel any unease living here.

When I first arrived, I was endlessly surprised by the amount of security people use to feel safe. Windows have steel bars, shops and banks have armed guards, every police officer is armed, car showrooms offer bullet-proofing as an option…

It all becomes normal through osmosis, but I still question the need for all this security. It would be nice to see a house with a garden, rather than a steel cage “protecting” the residents.

As this Reuters article states, there is an obsession with security in Brazil, but there are also some encouraging signs. The murder rate in New Orleans is five times that of São Paulo and bank robberies across the entire country dropped from over 3,000 a decade ago to 343 last year.

The Reuters article points out some anecdotal evidence, such as people freely using devices such as iPhones on a bus, something unthinkable just a few years ago. In many ways the freedom to use expensive devices such as a smartphone, laptop computer or iPod in public now feels just as it would in any other major city.

Would you walk around an unfamiliar street in New York or London late at night with your senses dulled by music from an iPod and gazing into the GPS-powered map on your iPhone? It’s pretty much the same here these days.

I was with my wife in a local bar the other day and she was telling the bar owner about our plans to move to the coast. Not just for the beach, but also because a smaller town would be safer than the city. He said he can only remember hearing of one robbery in the entire neighbourhood this year so how do we define ‘safer’ than that?

Maybe he just wanted to keep us as good customers. We are the only customers at his bar that run a slate with credit, paying him advance rather than him chasing us to settle the bill, but he sounded genuine.

As with city life anywhere, you can be a victim of crime through sheer bad luck, but most of the time you make your own luck through choices about how much wealth, gadgets, and jewellry  you display.

São Paulo may well have more crime then London, but I’m not scared to ride the bus or walk down the street. I still get unnerved by all the armed guards at banks though. If I am ever nearby when a bank robbery kicks off then I’ll be more scared of the guards than the criminals…

Steel bars and shutters

I had visited Brazil a few times before I moved here to live, so I was aware that they take security pretty seriously. Supermarkets and banks have armed guards, apartment blocks are surrounded by impenetrable steel cages, and all the police are armed – even the humblest traffic cop.

But when I moved into my house, a few things struck me as unusual. Every window has steel bars – like a jail – and both the front and back doors are protected by big steel bars too.

When I moved in, it was unnerving and unusual. My front door in Muswell Hill opened onto the street, my front door in Ealing was not facing the street, but there was nothing to stop anyone walking up to the door. The open spaces at the front of houses, gardens for example, just don’t really exist here. If a house or apartment black has a garden then it is behind bars so only the residents can possibly access it.

Walking down a main street late at night is also strange. Every shop, bar or restaurant will have steel shutters. I know there are some shops in London that pull shutters down at night, but not every single shop. It’s quite normal to walk past shops late at night where only a pane of glass stands between you and their stock.

This sense of security makes me think of when I have visited Luxembourg. The head of state lives in a palace in the city centre that any member of the public can approach. You can walk up and have a look through the window. They don’t feel any need to erect barriers.

Quite a contrast to the average apartment-dweller in Brazil who only feels safe living inside a cage.

But, with the riots in London and across the UK over the past week, will this fear of the unknown and underclass pervade society so bars go up and steel shutters become essential?

I hope not, but I’m expecting the worst.

Noise pollution

São Paulo is a big city, the largest in both the western and southern hemisphere and almost 20 million people if you include the suburbs. That means it’s also quite a noisy place, but one thing about all that noise that still annoys me is the alarms.

Shops, banks, cars, motorbikes are all alarmed and therefore “protected” from crime – at least that is the assumption.

But walk down the streets here and you will hear alarms going off all the time. It’s a cacophony of sirens that are entirely ignored by the population. The endless sirens have been normalised and are just a part of the background noise of the city.

Near to where I live there is a Chinese restaurant with a delivery service, meaning quite a few guys on motorbikes will be hanging around outside waiting for an order – so they will get the food and jump on their bike to deliver it. The bike alarms are always going off without anyone ever making any attempt to steal them.

So the alarms are faulty, and when they do go off, they are just ignored – so the alarm serves no purpose. There is a parrot living in a house nearby and he now imitates the alarms on the motorbikes. Even to the point that he copies the siren noise *and* the automatic voice saying “this bike is being stolen, please call this phone number…”

An alarm that is ignored, yet it gives out an automated message with a phone number to call. A futile gesture indeed.

Take a look at this video of a branch of Itau bank near to where I live. This was in the morning today at about 10.30am. The alarm had been screaming out for over 5 hours according to the people in the shops around there.

Five hours. Nobody from Itau did anything to shut down the alarm. No police or security paid any attention. What is the point of an audible alarm like this if nothing happens when the alarm goes off?

Here is a radical suggestion to the mayor of São Paulo… ban all the audible alarms. Bank and shop alarms could send a message to the security people. Cars and bikes would just have an immobiliser instead of an audible alarm.

The alarms would be a lot more effective in protecting against crime, and the people in the city would be able to marvel at their new-found peace.

The mayor did something similar with his Cidade limpa legislation in 2006 – where all billboards and public advertising were banned and removed. How about dealing with the aural, as well as visual, pollution?

It’s a dog’s life in Brazil

Back in London, I had my Staffordshire Bull Terrier, Matilda. Matilda has a great temperament, is very friendly and intelligent – she even once featured on Channel 4′s TV show about the most intelligent dogs in the UK.

It was normal for me and Matilda to go walking together in parks, cemeteries, playing fields, where she would roam off the lead. Going for a sniff here and there, and going to say hello to any other dogs and people out walking.

The interesting paradox in the UK is that dogs get a lot more freedom in a city like London because dogs can walk freely in almost any open public place. In the English countryside there is always the concern over livestock – dogs can’t worry farm animals, and many beaches have dog restrictions.

Here in Brazil it’s all different for dogs.

Many people have pet dogs and there are not a huge number of strays wandering the streets – like India where stray hounds are all over the place. But it seems the dogs fall into one of two camps. They are either guard dogs or toy dogs with very little in between.

So, you can walk past a house and an aggresive Rottweiler or German Shepherd will do it’s best to attack you. Making you fear that the gate might open and a dog resembling the one in the Omen might get you. Or you walk past someone in the street who has a couple of tiny toy dogs that are so aggressive, it’s impossible to get close to them.

And it’s not possible to let them off the lead in parks. In fact, it’s not possible to even enter the park, because most parks ban dogs. Given the way most dogs here behave, that’s understandable, but it compounds the problem because what most of these dogs really need is socialisation with other dogs and people. Banning them from parks, banning them from being able to run free anywhere, and encouraging them to remain locked up at home all day, or walked around the block for just ten minutes each evening means most of the dogs here are neurotic and anti-social.

I sense an enormous business opportunity. Not kennels or training, just offering a safe place for dogs to play and socialise together in a place where leads are not required and owners can chat together and allow their mutts to meet. I’m sure I could earn a fortune for setting up something that’s available in every single park in London.

The day the brakes died

I crashed my car last Saturday. A lot of people have been asking me about it on Twitter and Facebook, so here is the story… fortunately it all ends pretty well considering how bad this could have been.

In May me and Angie bought ourselves a new car. New to us at least, but it was actually a fifty-year-old VW Beetle – or ‘Fusca’ as the Beetle is known in Brazil. Considering it was a 1961 model, it was in astounding condition with a new engine having done fewer than 500km and all new interior and seats… it looked great and we wanted a car just for weekends anyway. This is a big city of 20m people, believe me, the bus and metro are better options during the week.

We used the car a few times around town and a couple of weeks ago put it in for some maintenance work. All the normal servicing work like brakes, sparks, filters, oil… plus our local garage told us the suspension was a bit dodgy and the carburettor was shot, so we had everything done.

I collected the car from the garage last Saturday and was pleased to find it running so nicely. The gear changes were noticeably better and it just felt that way cars do after a big service and tune-up – improved.

Unfortunately, on the way back from the garage I was running along a long downhill stretch of Rua Diana and the lights turned red. There was no rush, so I slowly applied the brakes. Then suddenly the pedal felt like it snapped. It went to the floor. I pushed it up and down a couple of times only to find it was completely loose and we had no brakes!

A taxi had stopped at the red light and we ran straight into the back of it.

I hurt my hand as it was still on the steering wheel and my thumb was torn backwards… it’s still sore now. Angie had it worse than me as her seatbelt broke so she was thrown into the windscreen, banging her head on the glass and bashing her knee into the dashboard.

Thankfully though, we were both OK and able to walk out of the car to talk to the taxi driver and figure out how to get our car off the road.

I was angry with myself for not yanking the handbrake, but then the time between the brakes failing and us rolling into the car may have been a couple of seconds at most – I was focused on the brake failure and just never had time to take alternative action…

It was particularly annoying to have just spent a lot of money at the garage, and to have all the brake pads changed, only to find the brakes failing on the car. I was initially pretty angry about the situation. We could have been going faster, there could have been a person instead of a taxi, or a child could have stepped in front of us… the situation could have been a hundred times worse and yet we had supposedly just had the brakes fixed up.

The short story of the aftermath is that the taxi driver was very philosophical about it all. He lost a day of work, but was actually OK about it – enjoying his day off. He asked us for about £200 to repair his bumper, which he has still not come around to claim so he is in no hurry. He has chatted on the phone and talked of his sorrow at seeing a nice classic car all broken up. He was sorry for us and we had crashed into him!

Our car has a damaged bumper, bonnet, and wheel arch, but remarkably the axle and steering are all OK so it’s superficial damage that looks worse than it is. We are waiting for a couple of repair estimates still, but it shouldn’t be too much.

The garage where we had the work done rescued us with a tow-truck and they have kept the car all week. They are sorting out the brakes. It was a hydraulic failure – so all the pressure was lost suddenly. Though we were pretty angry with the garage, they had not done any work on the hydraulic system itself so it was just one of those things – it could have happened anytime. And in any case they are now fixing it up for us without any labour charges.

So, it has all turned out OK in the end. The damage won’t cost too much to repair, the guy with the taxi was more upset about our car than his, and our injuries were only minor and already healing.

On the evening of the crash itself though I did find it hard to sleep, just thinking about all those possibilities. For a total brake failure, we had just about the best possible conditions, fairly slow, running up to a red light, with a car in front to take the impact rather than sailing out into a main road. It could all have been so much worse, and with Angie’s seatbelt breaking with only a minor crash the thought of what might have happened if we had been going faster was quite disturbing.

Angie now doesn’t trust the car. It’s romantic to have a beautiful fifty-year-old car rather than some boring grey motor from GM, but this episode with the brakes has shaken her. We may well be selling it as soon as it looks perfect again… and getting the typical city-dwellers 4×4.

I never thought I would say that, but I’m also thankful to still be here after that experience.