'Now this bell tolling softly for another...'

Christmas Day being spent in time-honoured fashion, just the two of us, eating, drinking and opening a few things, we rather reluctantly took ourselves out on a lunchtime buffet invitation on Boxing Day. At the last minute I picked up the bag of remaining bread crusts, which, with typical largely self-defeating parsimony, I collect over time and freeze, and which had not succeeded in being transfigured into stuffing, and said we would go to the beach afterwards, the weather notwithstanding, and feed them to the seagulls, which would also give us an excuse to leave early.

I was glad of this, being tetchy and disinclined towards either the food or the company, both of which were perfectly pleasant, the fault was with me. It was raining when we left but we headed beachward anyway, and when we arrived the rain did clear somewhat, and we had quite a long low tide walk. It was, in fact, a perfect Boxing Day place to be: chill and damp and blowy and empty of any souls except ourselves, a feisty little sandy coloured dog and his chap, and a handful of lonely, mewing seagulls, none of whom were interested in the bread crusts, and way off in the distance, a harvesting tractor like a toy, plying its way between the mussel posts on the far away tideline - people work on Boxing Day here. 

We set off back with pink cheeks and aching ears. Within ten miles or so of home, near Quessoy, we noticed black smoke blowing across the sky in front of us, and cars stopped with hazard lights on. Some way ahead, on its own, a small green car very much like mine, hazards also flashing, at first seemed to be the source of the smoke, till we realised that in fact the fire was coming from another vehicle, less clearly visible, in a field off the road. After a few moments waiting, we turned carefully in a driveway, where a woman stood grim-faced under an umbrella, with a look of an impassive but resolute witness, and returned home by another way. We were unsettled and a bit jumpy the rest of the way, but got in, lit the fire, made tea and did our best to put it from our minds. 

Living here as we do, we aren't automatically connected to events, don't, I'm afraid, tune into local TV or radio, or take a regular local paper; we have to make the effort to find out about things, or else we learn things by chance in conversation, which is hit-or-miss, especially since old Marie next-door-but-one moved on anyway. The following day curiosity drove me to the computer and the Télégramme, where we learned that the burning car contained a fatality, a man of 59 who, inexplicably, had lost control of the vehicle, hit an oncoming car - presumably the small green one - and gone off the road, the car instantly bursting into flames. He was, as the gendarmes delicately put it 'carbonisé dans l'habitacle, les témoins n'ayant rien pu faire'  - 'burnt to a crisp in the driving seat, the witnesses being able to do nothing'. The young family in the other car, a couple in their thirties and their four-year old child, were taken to hospital, shocked but unhurt. It had happened no more than half an hour before we got there.

Something of a 'for whom the bell tolls' moment.  And yet, 'any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in Mankind' isn't really true for most of us, it can't be, we couldn't survive if it were. I'm left pondering this matter of closeness of death and disaster, the difference which distance, or ignorance, makes to us. It's about  personal fear: it could have been me... if we'd been on that road a little earlier... Yet in terms of probability, a miss is as good as a mile, and I don't think that's the whole story, though what else is compassion, fellow feeling, that trite word empathy if you will, but a sense putting oneself in the place of? And I'm wondering why my imagination, which seems dismally impoverished in terms of an ability to construct fiction, visualise some spatial and constructional project Tom has in mind, or even know which colours of wool will go together, has been working with great energy and creativity when it comes to the last few moments in that car, and what it contained when we saw it, in a way it doesn't, or at least I have not too much difficulty curbing it, with the Malaysian air disaster, say, or the Greek ferry, or a similar road accident in the next department, or even the same crash on a day when I wasn't anywhere near it. I wonder if he was someone known to anyone I know (even dwelled briefly on whether it might have been someone we'd seen at the party earlier; it wasn't); I hope not, but of course he was known and probably dear to someone, may have had a dog waiting at home... enough.

I don't want it brought any closer, but then again I do because I want to know the facts, out of morbid curiosity or to contain and make them safer; had he been drinking, or burning the candle at both ends, was the car not roadworthy, did he pass out? Much of which will never, presumably, be known anyway, but we tend, I think, to want to believe there was some 'good' reason why it happened, a kind of superstitious rationalism which we hold to, that if one just follows all the right and correct and logical procedures, these episodes of cosmic injustice won't happen to us.

But now I am home and warm and safe and looking forward to a walk after lunch; a distance of time is already establishing itself, and I'll post about something more cheerful next time.