A Shocking Incident

My life has been in a state of chaos for last couple of days, with two consecutive evenings disrupted by yet more localised power outages.  That's four this year and two in as many days.  Yesterday's lasted just under eleven hours - Scottish and Southern Electricity (SSE) were told about the outage just after it occurred at around eleven in the morning, but didn't bothering sending anyone to the sub station for nearly four hours.  An hour and a half after that, more people were sent out to start digging up the pavement by the sub station.  Well, I say the sub station, but they spent nearly an hour parked in my road (which is a couple of streets over from the sub station) doing sweet FA.  As ever, SSE are assuring everyone that they've fixed the problem once and for all.  Except that I can guarantee that they won't have.  So, as ever, I've made another complaint about the frequency of these outages, SSE's failure to maintain its infrastructure adequately and their poor response times.  As ever, it will be ignored by SSE.  I can see that the only solution to SSE's inability to maintain a power supply to my house will be to install my own generator. Or move house to somewhere SSE isn't responsible for maintaining the local power infrastructure.

But I don't want to waste any more time on SSE. Going back to the previous post and that strange incident with the deer apparently performing some kind of vigil over its dead companion, which affected me quite deeply.  Well, one of the reasons it might have struck such an emotional chord with me is that, many years ago, I actually struck a deer whilst driving one Sunday evening a few miles from the incident.  That affected me quite badly at the time.  Thankfully, I've never hit a person while driving a car, but I can only imagine that how sickened I felt after striking and killing the deer is similar to how it must feel to run a person down. But much, much worse.  In part, it is the sheer feeling of helplessness you have as you realise that hitting that animal is inevitable - there is nothing you can do to avoid it.  It was made worse by the fact that I had seen the deer in good time - it had crossed the road already and I thought that it was going to vanish into the fields beyond.  But for some reason, it turned around and ran back across the road, right in front of me.  Even though it wouldn't have done any good, I couldn't brake sharply as there was in idiot in a BMW hanging off of my rear bumper. 

I do recall that, as the deer ran in front of the car, the words 'big cat' flashed into my mind for some reason.  Perhaps it was because of the colour of the animal's fur - it reminded of a lion.  Who knows?  As I say, I was left badly shaken up by the incident and, once I'd shaken off the pillock in the BMW, I had to pull over, as I felt physically sick.  The damage to the car was pretty extensive and it ended up spending a couple of weeks off of the road in a body shop.  (Luckily for me, it was a company car, so my insurance wasn't affected).  Anyway, what the whole sorry business brought home to me was that if hitting a deer on the road upset me that much, then hitting a person would be emotionally catastrophic.  It's something I've thought about a lot since that night and I honestly don't know how I could live with myself if I ever killed a person like that.  It wouldn't matter if it was an accident and they'd stepped out in front of me without warning: I know that I'd still feel responsible.  So, maybe that's why the recent deer business had such an impact on me: it brought back all those feelings of guilt over that other deer all those years ago.