the ineluctable modality of fender benders

Warm sunshine on the river Liffey.
Paused in traffic along the quays of Dublin.
I am five minutes from the car park.
I see her coming in my rearview.
Little blue Nissan bubble car.
Getting closer.
Presently I realise she ain't stopping.
She wakes up at the last minute and jams on the brakes.
There is a crunch as her car impacts with mine.
Somewhat wearily Ireland's greatest living poet exits his vehicle.
He looks around briefly at the cars alongside whose drivers have witnessed the collision.
They speed away.
Almost apologetically.
But they do speed away.
The driver of the other car approaches me.
She is crying.
Young girl.
Maybe early twenties.
Student.
"Boo hoo," she says, "I'm so sorry, boo hoo."
I launch into my Errol Flynn routine.
"Oh come on," I say with a big reassuring smile. "Neither of us are hurt. Nothing else matters."
(Cary Grant routine surely? - Ed note.)
I notice she has a rather pleasantly curvaceous form, garbed in a finely woven short skirt which reveals equally pleasantly tapering silken clad legs.
Women have legs.
Who would have thunk it.
She stops crying.
"My boyfriend will be furious," she murmurs apparently in reference to the car.
Ah yes bold readers.
She boyfriended me.
Fully thirty seconds after ramming my car, she felt the urgent need to convey to me the information that she had a boyfriend.
A new low.
Thirty seconds after the crash.
"My boyfriend will be furious."
Just slipped into the conversation like.
Hoo boy.
Heelers dazzles another love struck waif.
We swap insurance details and phone the cops.
As we stand in the road, some of the more gormless drivers in the Republic of Ireland honk their horns at us.
The girl does her best to look unperturbed.
I do my best not to look at her legs.
The police arrive after half an hour.
They're very professional and polite.
I feel a bit guilty about my earlier attempts to highlight deaths in the basements of police stations, deaths at the side of the road when people were being interviewed by police, and sundry other intimidations, violations and assaults, that have occurred at the hands of corrupt Irish cops recently.
The police officers who attended at the scene of my accident are one hundred per cent fautless.
Me and the girl who crashed into me were both damn happy to have them there.
After a few minutes cops and crashed car drivers bid their adieus.
I drive back to the Chateau de Healy.
The Dad meets me in the garden and I tell him what has transpired.
"You won't believe this," sez the Dad. "But I had a premonition something like that was going to happen to you."
I goggled mildly.
"No way," sez I.
The Dad nods vigorously.
"I did," he insists. "For a few days now. It was just a feeling that you were going to be in some sort of trouble on the road. This morning I was even going to advise you to take my car."
I favour the Dad with a searching look.
"Dad old pal," sez I, "I'm always more impressed with premonitions that I hear about it before the events that are being foretold actually come to pass. In future if you have any intimations from the other side that I'm about to be in a car crash, would you kindly let me know in advance?"