No yesterdays on the road

The crash of splintering glass jerked me from my sleep as the books from my bag were scattered across the floor. The coach lurched to a halt and the confusion was immediate. A car lay, sprawled and flattened in the outside lane.

My journey is, I hope, to travel as far as possible over land, no flying, except on the way home.  And to detour to go to Madrid for a week. But apart from that, no flying. Four months of trains and buses; couch surfing and solitary travel Eastwards. But this wasn't Ulan Bator or Irkutsk, the chaos of Place de l'Étoile or Rome, no. We'd crashed 20 minutes south of Guildford. Tokyo's a long way at this rate.

Moments of panic filled the bus before Englishness took over. A sensible woman quickly established no one was hurt, "Driver? Driver, are you ok?", as I picked up my books, in case this was purgatory and we had a long wait. It seemed a bit of a waste, dying 20 minutes south of Guildford. At least I'd died in my sleep, that's what people usually ask for, isn't it? This probably isn't what they mean. We looked back at the tangled quadrilateral of a car. Was anyone in it? They'll need help. But the front corner was smashed and the door wouldn't open. People began to sit down again.

Within moments an even more sensible lady from Tescos (yes, from Tescos, I don't know where, or how, or why) came in through the emergency exit. She had quickly ascertained that there was no one in the other car, thank goodness, and came to check on us and the driver.

Ten minutes later the police arrived. The coach limped up to the nearest layby as the passengers tried to dissect what had happened. I couldn't work out why the driver had left their car in the outside lane, I mean, there's an accident waiting to happen.

I didn't know how to start this blog. In fact, for a long time, I wasn't that sure about whether to write one. Who would want to read it? It's just the e-equivalent of looking at my photo albums, and I've only found one person who ever did that. We're not in contact anymore. And, let us face it, there is plenty of verbose, pompous and turgid rubbish online already - I can only add to the detritus of our obsession with self-expression (of which, I must ruefully admit, I'm a staunch advocate).

After accepting the inevitability of it all, I moved on to ruminate over what I'd write about: a dreary list of countries visited and sights seen suitable for even my family to view or a coruscatingly personal account of a journey of self-discovery, soul-searching and generally talking about myself and my feelings a lot. It will end up somewhere in the middle I guess.

The chief delay in starting though, has been the importance of how I'd start it. When we did crash, I quickly realised it was a classic opening gambit, though I shied away from the "I woke up and quickly realised I was dead. Certainly I was in some sort  of purgatory, somewhere south of Guildford." as it's been done before rather better by quite a few novelists of a surrealist bent. Which is a roundabout way of saying, "Please feel free to comment on anything or everything." Suggest improvements, better turns of phrase or more elegant rhetorical flourishes. After all, I know it's not "Call me Ishmael." We could turn this into some sort of "blog of all the talents". And it would save me emailing.

I rather fear that I could go on and on about the importance of opening lines, in essays, novels, in songs and poems. Or I could take this in the direction of musings on the nature of near misses and false starts. Maybe even link it thematically to the rather apposite exhibition I saw in London, Life Before Death. But I shan't. This will never get posted otherwise, I'm already a week behind.