You might remember a story from a few weeks ago about the lamp post. As a reminder, it was about me reversing into a one at maximum speed, and hitting it so hard it looked like the back of the van was eating it.
You know when you see a girl with leggings wedged right up her crack? Yeah, it looked like that.
Anyway, when they’d finished being annoyed, the people at the courier company I worked for gave me another one.
As far as I can recall, they didn’t specifically ask me not to break that one too, which is just as well I suppose.
One evening I was in Sheffield with a friend on the way back home from somewhere, and while passing Meadowhall, there was a little single-track road that dipped down under a small bridge.
Where the road dipped under the bridge there was a huge puddle, probably about waist deep.
We all know about aquaplaning, don’t we? If you drive over a puddle on the motorway, the car glides over the top of the water and you lose traction.
So that means it doesn't matter how deep it is if you’re on top of the water, as you don’t touch the bottom anyway.
So my logic told me that as long as we hit the puddle under the bridge fast enough, we’d aquaplane over the top of it and safely get to the other side.
Made sense to me.
In theory.
With a good run-up, I managed to get to about 50mph as we got to the water. Yes, I thought, this will work, definitely fast enough.
When we hit it, it was like a massive water bomb had exploded! We came to an instant stop, and it felt like we were at sea in a storm, mostly underwater.
As the exploded water settled I could feel the van wobbling around, and it became apparent that we were floating.
After getting very wet, pushing the van out, calling AA and realising that I’d written off another van, I learned that I needed to get better at aquaplaning.
That, sadly, would have to happen another day.
In case you're wondering, it was written off because water was sucked into the water intake which instantly stopped the engine and the inertia broke the crank, con rods and probably the gearbox.
