Clarkson Article

Found this, thought it may be of some interest

Last year in Britain, slightly more than 5m people died. Over the course of my lifetime 250m people have died. And yet it was only last week that I saw my first dead body.
It was lying at the side of a country road near Johannesburg, one of the most dangerous and lawless cities on earth, so initially I thought it had been shot. But then, a few hundred feet down the road, I passed a big Suzuki motorbike, all battered and broken, and just as dead as its owner.
Of course there was no way of knowing the man was dead. He was surrounded by a thousand emergency vehicles and several million paramedics. But there was something about the way they moved, a lack of urgency, that gave the game away.
And it was all confirmed two hours later when I drove back down the same stretch of road. Because the big broken bike had gone. The ambulances and police cars had gone. And all bar one of the personnel had gone. But weirdly the body was still there.



I haven’t been able to get the image out of my head since. Who was he? What had he said to his wife that morning as he’d put on his leathers and gone outside to get on his big bike? What was he planning to do later that day? Or at work the following week? Had he planned a holiday this year? What would his kids do now, without a dad?
One minute he’s a human being thundering down a lovely road in an area known, ironically, as the Cradle of Humankind. The next he’s meat, a nuisance, a handful of ticks and crosses in a police investigator’s report.
Doubtless his wife will have spent the time since wailing and weeping and wondering why the bloody hell he’d gone and got himself a motorbike. And I’m with her. Why indeed?
You get hit by lightning and it’s bad luck. You die in a car accident and it’s one of those things. You have to drive to get about and people die while driving. You have an accident at work and it’s the same story. You get shot by a robber and even then you can still see the logic: “If I steal your wallet and then kill you, I stand less chance of being caught.” But dying in a motorbike accident seems so completely futile.
I know they’re a thrill. I know it gives you a buzz to hurtle down a country lane on a sunny day while encased entirely in leather. I know all that. But one tiny mistake, which might have nothing to do with you, and you’re a memory, you’re a smudge in the hedgerow. You’re playing a lottery where the prizes are small and the cost of failure is just gigantic. And I don’t get that.
In Britain bikes account for just 1% of all road transport. Yet they account for nearly 20% of all fatalities. Of course, dead bikers do provide a valuable public service in that people with fatal diseases can have new eyes and fresh spleens, but having seen the accident in South Africa last week, I think we could go further. Instead of taking the body away, why not just leave it in place?
All of us fear death, but when you actually see it, you become even more determined to give it a wide berth.
After seeing a body for the first time I have genuinely slowed down a bit. Coming home from London the other night I pulled out to overtake when I was 98% certain the road ahead was clear. But then an image of that poor man’s twisted head popped into my head and I abandoned the manoeuvre before it had really begun.
Yesterday, while driving into my local town, a mother was walking down the pavement with a little girl of three or four. Normally I’d have slowed and covered the brake in case the toddler leapt into the road, but after my South African experience, I damn nearly stopped.
And I can’t tell you how that felt when, moments later, the little girl did indeed run into the road. That dead biker, then, 6,000 miles away in Johannesburg, had unwittingly saved the life of a little girl in England.
You may think this all a bit too convenient. A bit too editorial. But it happened. I really was thinking of the dead man, and braking when the girl ran out. If I’d been doing 30 I’d have hit her. But I was doing 10, maybe less. So I didn’t.

Cheerful for a Monday morning.

Yeah sorry! Was just a change to hear him not being a prat.

[G]

Read that along time ago.

Always like to reads his coloumns on the timesonline website.

He works on a programme that straps a man in a jet powered car, and that's not futile.

He's still a prat.

I actually like JC's style of presentation tbh. The article simply amde me raise the following question..

What if his first ever sighting of a dead body had been that of a car driver? You must remember that JC does have a very jaundiced view of motorcycling,he just does not understand what it is about. That is where all of his anti biking comments come from.

Me too. As above:- timesonline has got loads available. Under driving & Comment sections

I guess he's just pointing out that it's a dangerous hobby. Very few of us are forced to ride, we choose to.

I look at what I do day to day, and motorcycling presents by far the biggest chance of me maiming myself. It's certainly something I think about.

His argument doesn't hold water; he loves high speed flight, space travel, car racing. None of those things are essential to everyday life, like using bikes recreationally they are all "just because". Would the wife/kid of the man have been any less gutted if he'd died car racing? I doubt it.

As an aside, it's oddly out of character for him to concede that slowing down is sometimes a good thing.

Originally Posted by gettin2dizzy

Yeah sorry! Was just a change to hear him not being a prat.

Brilliant!