Red Dog on shootouts.....

After reading Tom's Peggy Shitter story it reminded me of this:

Graham who is a friend of mine was working in Nottingham and had a couple of hours to kill before doing his next job so he decided to visit a friend of his who is a screen printer. When he arrived at his friends house he noticed that his normally heavily stickered van was no where to be seen and instead a plain white van was in the driveway, thinking that his friend may be out he got out of his car and knocked on the front door.

To Graham's delight, Derek the screen printer answered the door and invited him in for a drink, before the kettle had finished boiling Graham started to enquire about the plain white van in the driveway, it turned out Derek and his van had been involved in a rather bizarre accident and the replacement was a hired van. This is how Derek retold the details of the accident:

I was driving along the A52 very early last Tuesday morning with virtually no other cars on the road, I glanced into my rear view mirror and saw a mini coming up behind me very quickly indeed, with only a few feet to spare the mini pulled out, overtook me and sped off to about 400 or 500 yards in front. At this stage I didn't think too much about what had just happened but then I saw the mini suddenly brake and slow to a crawl, as I approached I pulled out and overtook him but within a minute or so the mini was fast approaching from behind me again. This time the mini was weaving all over the road quite badly and only just missed the rear end of my van before pulling out and overtaking me again, the near miss alerted me to slow down to about 25 mph as the mini danced from one side of the road to the other now several hundred yards in front of me again.

After this second near miss Derek described how he was now pretty miffed at the mini driver, as he continued his journey he had just about recomposed himself when he caught sight of the same mini again. The mini had pulled over and stopped at the side of the road, as Derek approached him cautiously from behind he gave him a wide berth and slowly overtook him giving the mini driver the five knuckle shuffle hand gesture as he passed. Unbelievably though within a minute of passing the mini Derek described how the mini was right behind him again, however this time as the mini tried to pass him he clipped the rear of Derek's van, this then sent the mini into a spin and ended up crashing into the side of his van before ending up wrapping it around the railings that divided the dual carriage way.

Derek pulled over and rushed to the car to make sure the driver was ok, when he opened the mini’s door the driver, who looked about 90+ years old, was shook up and slightly dazed but not badly hurt, in the rear of the mini however was a much younger looking man with blood all over him with some very nasty looking wounds to his head, body and especially his legs, there was also a lot of mangled up metal laid across him. Derek immediately went back to his van to call 999, and within a few minutes the police and ambulance had arrived, once the passenger in the rear of the mini had been carted off to hospital the police questioned Derek, in his van, about the accident before questioning the mini driver.

Several minutes later the policeman returned from questioning the mini driver, with what looked like tears in his eyes, Derek feared the worse and thought that the passenger may have died. Fortunately this was not the case and the policeman had in fact returned to Derek's van with tears from laughter rolling down his cheeks. It turned out the mini driver was indeed 94 years old and when the police officer had asked him for his driving licence the driver replied that he had been driving for more than 60 years and had never needed nor been asked for a driving licence before so he had never bothered to get one. Derek then asked about the passenger in the rear of the mini, the policeman replied that just prior to Derek seeing the mini for the first time the 94 year old driver had just ran into his passenger who was on a bicycle on his way to work the old guy was taking the cyclist to hospital when he was involved in this accident with Derek. Apparently all of the cyclist's injuries were sustained when the mini driver ran over him and the old guy had even collected his mangled bike and popped it in the back of the mini with him to take to the hospital.

Funny but 100% true, you couldn't make this stuff up could you?