Crash Test Dummies

Only recently I borrowed an expression by QEII here and called 2025 an "Annus Horribilis", hoping that Q4 of this year at least would be uneventful in the most positive sense of the word. Not so. If you are following me on Instagram you might have seen picures of the car crash that cut short mine and Mum's plans to drive to Klagenfurt only about 15 minutes after we had left the country house. My mother had arrived on Monday night, seizing the opportunity for some change of scenery after stressful weeks of house renovation and getting to join me in the car rather than taking the train back. Well, the lady who drove the other car and claimed not to have seen us coming, sabotaged that plan and so it ended up being a Thursday night and weekend of inconvenience, expense, uncertainty and above all, also physical pain (Mum can barely move her upper body from seatbelt whiplash syndrome and I got second-degree burns on my left wrist from the airbag explosion to name just two issues). Nonetheless, we are not complaining and consider ourselves lucky we survived this crash pretty much unscathed. The other car was considerably more "massive" than ours and the speed and impact was enough to trigger all airbags so you can imagine that a different angle or the car behind me not being able to stop could have caused much more harm and possibly even fatalities. 

I was supposed to fly to Malta the day this post goes live and had been looking forward to it for weeks, but then woke up with a killer throat ache the night to Sunday, having already felt a suspicious and all too familiar itch in my throat the day before. Well, even though my mother likes to be in denial and officially never falls ill, but just "caught a cold from that breeze in the restaurant the other night" I scraped together the testing liquid of those half dried-up antigen Covid tests and: BINGO...then I tested the suspected "Patient Zero". Yep. 

So: dear Whoever-is-in-Charge-of-F***ups: can I just have a calm November and December, pretty please?