Be Excellent To Each Other

1) I was in the WTC 6 years and 1 Week before they were destroyed

2) If it wasn't 1/2 term I would have been walking through Victoria Train Station when the IRA bomb went off in 1991

3) I heard the motor attacks on Downing Street a week earlier whilst actually at school. (I went to Westminster city school, on Palace Street in Victoria, aprox 1/2 a mile away from the PMs house)

Malc

If I'd have been driving just a few feet further right earlier today then I'd have ploughed straight into an oncoming bus.

I avoided the black death by being born 35 years ago and not being a pheasant.

If I had been born 200 years ago I'd be dead now.

Oh, a 4th one: If the 7/7 bombs had been in 1999 rather than 2005 then I might have been on the tube that got blown up between Liverpool Street and Aldgate, but I would have got off at Moorgate (1 stop before Liverpool Street)

Malc

When the chap got shot in the Brixton McDonalds, I was there about 15 minutes earlier.
He ran off down the street my office was on.

If I were sat in my office chair just a few feet to the left, there wouldn't be a floor to support it and I'd probably fall two stories to my death/paralysis.

If I had fallen over into the middle of the road when I just walked to the shop, I'd have been run over by a bus.

If my Dad hadn't cancelled a business trip to America then I would not exist as sperm only has a limited life span.

Is this the worst concept for a thread ever?

I was no more than a couple of crossings away when this happened.

No, just a few people haven't entered the spirit of it, I guess they must never of had that: "omg, that could have been me if it wasn't for this, this, that, that, oh and this" feeling.

Malc

In theory, yes, but in practice your poker thread was worse.

And I was in Japan when this happened. No idea where I was at the time though (09.18 local time would suggest I was in bed ).

Edit - I did catch some trains while I was there, so it was a pretty close call

I was completely safe when I visited Japan. However, if I'd have gone during the later half of WW2 it could have potentially put a real downer on our Honeymoon.

A shop three feet from my sister's bus stop was bombed by the IRA years back at about the time she'd have been standing there. She'd taken the day off.

I would have bled to death when I was 11 if an off-duty nurse hadn't taken a shortcut down the very quiet semi-country lane I was lying in. I've no idea who she was, either, on account of all the blood in my eyes.

I'd probably be blind in one eye if the fish hook my sister got stuck in my eyelid had gone half a centimetre lower. Still attached to a line, natch. And maggots. A red one and a yellow one.

If I hadn't come to London 4 years ago this weekend, with the singleminded intention of having sex with my friend at her birthday party, I would never have met my wife.

Oh, this thread is about averting disaster. As you were.

at this thread!!!

I was late for work the morning of the 7/7 bombs, and as such missed a chance of being exploded. ...and whilst they were Geographically close to my location, I would have had to change at London Bridge by mistake... and then again at Bank.

300 of the dead from the WTC 9/11 thingy were from my company, as one of the planes directly hit the floors we owned. Had I been transferred to the New York office I would surely have died!

My wife was in warrington on the day of the IRA attack. The next street over.

I don't have any tenuous links to disaster. In a bike crash in which I broke my wrist, though, I'd have plummeted a couple of hundred feet to my death if not for a chain fence. Good job it was there, and good job I was going about 10mph.

Mal, you're excused. Disaster follows you around

How dare you speak about Rachel like that!

Never had a tenuous link to disaster, it's either all or nothing

In short I've had a rifle in my face, been surrounded by ships calling in piracy reports, washed overboard, had ropes snap on me, had wires snap around me, been pinned by cargo, had a barge start sinking while we were still towing it, etc.

John Tenta was born in Canada. I have relations who live in Canada.

I've lost a fair few half biscuits from over dunking.

Had I needed to sneeze at around 8.53am today, and had looked up into the sun to try and trigger my photic sneeze reflex, I would have trod in dog poo.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/england/4816206.stm

I was on the sleeper train to Edinburgh at the time and it got diverted to Glasgow instead, for some reason. I was in no danger at any time.

I just had a cigarette. Thank the lord I hadn't poured a can of petrol over my head immediately before I lit up. Thinking of what could have happened under those circumstances has made me feel a little ill, and needing to go home.

If my teacher hadn't got up in the middle of the night on a week away school trip to go to the toilet and on the way back to her room decided to check on the room that my friend and i were in (she hadn't checked any other rooms and doesn't know why she checked in on ours) then I would probably be either dead or seriously brain damaged (shut it!) and as it was I was in a coma for four days. She found me at 1.30am so I could have gone untreated for a further 7 hours.

When my grandad died, it was the school summer holidays and my dad was working shifts so when my mum was clearing out the house she had to take us with her. We had a Rover Metro and A Vauxhall Senator and my dad had promised to put petrol in the Metro after his nightshift so mum could take it because she didn't like driving the big car. Dad forgot to do this and my mum was forced to take the big car. On the way to my Grandads house on a 60mph road traffic was stopped and someone was't paying attention so drove into the back of us, on my side. If we had been in the Metro I'd have been flattened.

My aunt got a new car and we were driving down her street so slowed at her driveway to see it. We started accellerating again but hadn't reached 30 when we crashed into someone who hadn't stopped or looked at a junction where we had right of way. If we were going faster that would probably have been worse but I ended up with loads of tiny wee bruises all over my body because the glove box flew open when we crashed and I got pelted with hundreds of mint imperials

(I am now a very bad passenger and although I don't notice I'm doing it, people who drive with me in the car say I constantly press an imaginary brake and also grip the seats and handles. Sorry)

Oh, and not life threatning but funny...when Jen was younger she tried to leap frog a bollard and got er hands stuck under her ass, falling forward and breaking her collarbone

Yikes, what? Carbon monoxide or something?

She's Scotch! Obviously it was a cocktail of smack, Buckfast and deep fried Mars bars.

Hah

I do that, and I don't even drive.

Malc

Nah, Gills brain has always been oxygen starved. I think it's something to do with her head being stuck in the clouds all the time

Nothing that exciting I'm afraid...the place we were at was an outdoor adventure centre and it had dorms, but the staff didn't want to open up an extra dorm when there was only an extra two girls, so they put us in a staff dorm. Problem was, it had a bunk bed in it but because it was staff who used it the top bunk wasn't used and had no ladders. I slept in the top bunk and on the second night must have woken up and tried to climb out because I fell onto a concrete floor and fractured my skull from the front of my head above my eyebrow to back behind my hear. The doctors said that if I hadn't been treated when I was then it would have been even more serious but as it was I ended up on morphine for days and for the rest of the summer I wasn't allowed to do ANYTHING until it healed.
Two days after I got out of hospital, I was sitting in the garden with my mum and she went to get us juice. When she came back out, I was hanging upside down by my legs from a tree swinging backwards and forwards having a great time. I think she nearly had a heartattack.

Well I did say concept didn't I?

I couldn't be bothered to walk walk to proper crosisng place of a main road so decided to run across but without looking properly. At the last moment I realised it was dumb and stopped by the kerb. Then my mum drove past. Being run over by my mum would have been... embarassing.

When I was a nipper, my dad used to arrange regular booze cruises to Calais, Bologne and Zebrugge for his work colleagues and he used to take me along. I went on so many cross-channel ferries that in the end I was signed up to the 'Townsend Thoresen Young Captains Club', which basically gave you a little passport that you had to get stamped on every ferry you went on. Get enough stamps and you could spend a ferry crossing up on the bridge with the captain.

Sadly, Townsend Thoresen ceased to be before I could ever get enough stamps. However, we found my little passport a few years ago and it seems I've been on the Herald Of Free Enterprise eight times.

We went to France on that a few years before it sank. It was a bag of shit then. So was the Spirit that they used for the recreation, that we returned on.

Did you compo claim them right up the arse?

Well my parents did. The place got shut down. My mum used the cash for a holiday. Should I mention that she refused to help me pay for uni...does that make me sound bitter...?

Aye & I've never forgiven her

Thousands of kids no longer get to do awesome stuff in P7 as the place ended up getting shut down

Makes her sound smart for spotting a duff investment.

Don't jocks get free uni any way?

The other day I almost clicked on a JohnCoffey thread. If I hadn't been distracted by the phone ringing, I might have actually done it!

No no, you're thinking of juvie.

To be fair, I wrote it that way for neatness. We do get our tuition fees paid however my mother refused to complete the necessary forms to allow me to apply and to apply without your parents you needed 3 years proof of living alone. So i only got into uni at the last minute and quit after six months because I hated the course my mother had sleected for me. ( I only agreed to start it because I thought it was my escape route.) I have a rather exciting history with my mum. I probably shouldn't get started. Ooster will confirm it is stupidly over the top.

As do I.


Those were "fun" times, but for the sake of your blood pressure it's probably best not to speak of them.

Did you have to walk 500 miles to save her, Wullie?

If he had, he'd only have got halfway.