On assignment many years later, I attended the Berlin Film Festival, where I got to rub shoulders with some of the great film stars and movie directors of the time.
This was a dream come true for me, and interviewing some of these fascinating people got me fantasising about one day writing a short film.
To be honest, the idea of sitting on set in one of those fold-up canvas “director's chairs”, shouting “Shoot! Cut and print” rather appealed to me.
Recently, I decided to do something about it and signed up for a screenwriting course, where on the very first day, my colleagues in the class and I were challenged to come up with ideas for a film.
For one who considers themselves a seasoned writer, the challenge sounded easy until I got down to it and began putting ideas down on paper and rejecting them for sounding too improbable.
As my deadline neared, I witnessed a road accident and remembered a few of the collisions I have been involved in and thought I might use those experiences to come up with a story.
There was the night I was driving home after a late shift at the job I had at the time. I was carefully minding my own business when I encountered a ditch in the road that had been made and abandoned by a roadworks crew.
I was slowing down to preserve my trusty old Toyota Corolla when seemingly out of nowhere, a powerful BMW came roaring behind me and smashed into my boot, reversed and sped off in the direction we were both facing.
This was just before the era of ordinary people having mobile phones, let alone cameras on such phones, but I managed to see and mentally register the number plate of the runaway car.
After I made sure that I hadn’t been injured (thank Providence for seat belts), I got out to find that the impact caused my car to resemble an accordion.
Amazingly the car could still drive, so I drove to the nearest police station to record the accident in the Occurrence Book. I was also hoping against hope that the driver who had crashed into me might have done the right thing and gone to report at the police station.
That hope was in vain as no such report had been made. So I was left to report the accident and the following day, I had to start the whole insurance process, which was an administrative nightmare.
Eventually, the car was fixed at great expense to me, but I gave up all hope of ever finding the culprits.
Some time later, I was propping up the bar at my favourite watering hole and chatting to an old friend about my motoring woes.
When I got to the part about the registration of the car that hit me, his eyes opened wide. And after asking me to repeat the registration, he sighed and said he knew the car as it belonged to an uncle.
However, he was also aware that his uncle and aunt were abroad at the time of the accident.
After some digging, it turned out that it was his teenage cousins who had “borrowed” their parents’ car and after causing the accident, they had panicked at the idea of being caught out and had driven off.
The next morning, the young people had pooled their money to get a mechanic to repair and repaint their parents’ car. When a week or so later the parents returned, they appeared none the wiser.
I thought I might get compensation from the culprits or even get to see them punished by their parents. However, I realised that I had no proof that they had hit me and as such, I might be wasting my time and energy.
Sometimes that’s the way the cookie crumbles. Nevertheless, it might make for a good short film. What do you think?
