here's my tale

you know what it's like, you've been designated driver, it's 1 am, your mates are all pissed, you'r pissed off because they've been in the pub all nigth and you can't have a drink, you've got to get up early in the morning to drive miles and miles away for a family do

and then, one of your mates says "well, you've got a saph, show us what it can do"

and, like a plank, you "show" them what it can do

namely by driving along a country lane at breakneck speeds, rememebring that there are no lights on the approach to this humpbacked bridge, with a blind coner, loking at the speedo and realising it's the wrong side of 100 mph, seeing the glint of armco, and then spalmming the anchors on whilst simultaniously bricking it big time

we went from 110mph to 0 in about 40 feet
some of it may have been down to the braking, but most of it was down to the sied of the car going into the armco and leaving the 2 near side wheels underneath it, while the rest of the car ended up on it's belly in a ditch the hump backed bridge went over and began to rapidly fill with water

and there's more

me, like a plum, thought, "i've damaged the side, it's 4wd, i'll get out of this" and tried to start it up to drive it back

it wouldn't start and it was too dark to find the cutoff switch (have you tried to find one in a 92 spah? even with the panels out in the blinding daylight i couldn't find the thing) so i got out and made the phone call to the AA

who then charged me £300 to get the heavy lifting equipment it needed to get the car out and back home

unfortunatly i have no pics of the car or the accident site, but it pulled a huge lump of contrete out of the ground where it bent the armco, and i could only get one of the wheels out, but nly because it was still connected to the strut and the driveshaft, the tca had been torn out of the bottom and the passenger footwell was probably half the size it hsould have been

even the next morning, in the cold light of day, i thought i could fix it, but it was totally and utterly fooked, we couldn't close the doors after we'd opened them and the only thing that was holding the chassis straight were the strut braces front and rear, as soon as i started to loosen these off the whole shell started to groan

luckly, we all survived without any major damage, other than my left knee, which still gives me guy 9 years later (tewaked it pushing the trolley around sainsburys last night and i'm still limping slightly)

moral of the story is, "DON'T LISTEN TO YOUR PISSED UP MATES, LET THEM GET A CAB HOME!!!!! PUBS ARE FOR PROPER DRINKING OR PUB MEETS!!!!"

the end