What life changing things did you manage to avoid?

Reading the really sad accounts on the other thread, I go to thinking that I was actually a very fortunate person some time ago:

My mum and dad had booked a holiday (our first ever foreign holiday) to Corfu. My mum went into work to confirm the dates she needed but she was told she couldn’t take that particular week off so we changed to the exact corresponding flight a week later. If we had gone on the original date we would have been on the plane involved in the 1985 Manchester Airport plane disaster

Having children .

I didn’t go to the Bradford City vs Lincoln City football match in May 1985.

Not surprisingly really as I’m a Leeds fan

But some of my friends at Bradford university did, very shaken up although lucky to be in the Midland Road stand on the other side of the pitch to the stand that burned down killing 56(?) people

Getting caught!

Dying – well the permanent type anyway.
The first three turned out was only temporary..

Her name was Louise.

Her name was Louise.

+1 (probably not same Louise).

Also:
7/7 – would have been in the area of the first bomb if I wasn’t hungover and late.

Polonium poisoning – apparently I was on the plane that transported the gubbins that killed Litvinenko

Having kids – so far…

Bike ride with some friends to a garden centre when I was 8, 4 of them set off 3 returned.

Same year some other friends asked if I wanted go with them to arse around on the train tracks. I was busy helping my Dad, one ended up being seriously injured.

911 we were supposed to be NYC for our honeymoon but a few weeks before we went to book it our Lab pup was ran over and it took all our cash to sort her. We’d probably not have been at ground zero though.

I couldn’t get to a flight that crashed.

Boxing Day tsunami, 2004, Thailand.

Mrs Stoner and I were in Thailand on our honeymoon 5 years ago. On boxing day morning we went for a swim in the sea at our resort in Khao Lak before breakfast.

At breakfast on the spur of the moment we decided we would check out and move on to explore somewhere else. We packed our bags and paid our bill then wandered up to the main road a little after 9am. We had no idea when the next bus was due but one turned up before long and we got on heading for Trang on the other side of the country. The road took us up over the headland and away from the coast. The wave hit Khao Lak shortly after 10am and destroyed it. It was one of the worst hit areas and many families died – predominantly Scandinavian and German. Our resort was wiped out and I found out later that almost everyone there died. There were a number of young families there and I still think of them.

We didnt realise what had happened until we got off the bus hours later and watch the BBC World channel news in a bar in Trang.

We decided then to head back to Bangkok and think about heading home. In Bangkok we read in the English language papers that the Red Cross were desperate for European blood donations. They were massively understocked of blood group types with much higher incidences in white European populations than in the far east. Luckily Mrs S is loaded with super blood O- so her donation was of great value.

We’ve still got a folder of clippings from newspapers but havent look at it since 2005. We dont really think about it much, but when it comes round in the news now and then I always think of those families at Khao Lak.
http://singletrackworld.com/forum/topic/tsunami-c4#post-980007

as per stoner but not me, my family.

ma, pa and bro plus his family (wife and 3 kids) all lived in phuket for a good few years a while back.
usually went to the beach at nai yang in the morning, but this morning they were running late due to sister-in-law forgetting something and having to go back to the shops.
by the time they go there, the beach was shut, police telling them to turn around and go back.

theyd have all been on the beach when the wave hit if it wasnt for that.

we drove up to khao lak on one of our hols a few years later, very sobering.

+1 (probably not same Louise).

Mine was from Tring.

Child birth

another Louise – from Bath

Was due to do work at Bishopsgate the day the IRA blew it up but job got cancelled.

More recently was two decisions away from being on the A27 at shoreham about the time the Hunter crashed but was talked out of working late by a colleague as it was a Saturday.

CaptainFlashheart – Member

+1 (probably not same Louise).

Mine was from Tring.

Christ what is it with girls called Louise!

Mine lived in Cirencester. Pretty, well read, very inventive in the sack 😀 & of wealthy parents but & its a big but she was borderline paranoid about everything anyone said. Every thing you said got psycho analysed for the hidden meaning.
The poor sod she eventually married jumped in front of a train in Kemble 🙁

Got flung from a the passenger seat of a Mk1 Golf GTi as it splatted into a rock face. Came round a wee while later in the ditch and walked away with a slightly hurty shoulder and broken glasses. Not even a graze 🙂

My brother, mate in the back and the car didn’t fare quite so well.
Nobody died though, apart from the car. It was bigly deaded.

Pretty, well read, very inventive in the sack & of wealthy parents

There’s a theme developing here! Not just the name Louise!

Great wealth and top health!

Hah yes – I also had a lucky escape from a Louise.

I was also on holiday for 911 and 77 and did get to thinking I was some kind of jinx.

Five girls called Louise?

Seriously?

Note to any single chaps – Avoid girls called Louise.

I can add a Louise to the list – also from Gloucestershire, not at all inventive in the sack and very clingy.

Escaped a head-to-head motorbike crash purely because I’d screwed up the corner I was in and drifted in towards the centre line- bike coming the other way overshot the bend and went through exactly where I’d have been if I’d just been a wee bit sharper. That would have been less than fun, if I’d survived. Life means near misses but a near miss that only misses because you made a mistake is pretty shaky stuff- what if you’d done everything right?

Haha…. Another Louise…. Essex, this time.

Beautiful girl. Stunning.

Messed around for a year or two whilst at college. Lots of drugs and bedroom antics…. Although mostly, almost exclusively, not confined to the bedroom. It was at this time that I definitely saw the advantage to leather seats.

Think if we carried it on I’d still be living in South Essex… So definitely dodged a bullet there.

siwhite – Member

I can add a Louise to the list – also from Gloucestershire, not at all inventive in the sack and very clingy.

Not from Dursley was she? As I’ve just remembered another Louise 😮

8?

8 of them?

No-one called Louise.

But I’d have examined a parcel bomb left by the IRA about 5 mins before it blew, if I hadn’t taken off an evening shift in order to take Mrs M to an expensive resto. She was just the girlfriend, then.

I also had an appointment cancelled which should have seen me at the site of a 7/7 bomb at just the wrong time.

had a rugby scrum collapse on me. me head was right under my chest, my feet off the floor. couldnt breath and was at the stage of blacking out. then the weight moved sideways and it got light and i could breath again.

played in a game a few years later when a lad was paralysed in the same way.

Louise here.

Bloody tramp she was. 🙂

Well a year ago I was out in a group ride and the rider next to me on the inside rear of the group hit the worst pothole you’ve ever seen, crashed onto his head and died, despite my best efforts to save him. A few seconds earlier and I was in his place, as we were riding through and off. The accident was caught on my Fly 6 video and used to exonerate the club at his inquest, where I was the lead witness for the club. He left behind a wife and three sons. I think of him every time I ride by a pothole.

Coroner’s report to Surrey Concil has now been issued. https://www.judiciary.gov.uk/wp-content/uploads/2017/04/BRAZIER-2017-0090.pdf

wow. TiRed. I read much on the loss of your club buddy, but hadnt read the coroner’s report. Having seen some rubbish from coroners on cycling fatalities, it’s good to see something well thought out and considered. I guess we all hope lessons are learnt.

I was biking home after dropping my son off at his Mums & was kind of training for a Polaris Challenge & went home the long way round. If I’d been 5 seconds slower going up Shincliffe bank near Durham I’d have been wiped out by a Renault 5 that went past me on it’s roof.

Another near miss for me – a few years ago I was larking around with my mates in my front room (pretty well shitfaced) and jumped on my mate’s back who was sat in a chair in my front room. Somehow I rolled straight over the top of him and smacked my head hard on the hearth of my gas fire. It was one of those fires with ornate spikes to either side of the unit and I missed the spike by mere inches. When I woke the next day with a huge lump and an unusually strong headache I started to have flashbacks to the night before and realised I could very easily have spiked my skull on the spike 😯

I used to get the train to and from school, between Welwyn Garden City and Potters Bar. During my time at school there was both the Hatfield and Potters Bar train crashes.

The Hatfield one I don’t really think about, but if the points had failed at Potters Bar a few hours later I would have been stood on the platform the train crashed into along with a bunch of my friends.

I decided never to go to America, and thus narrowly avoided 9/11, the Sandy Hook massacre, the St Valentine’s Day massacre, Little Big Horn, Pearl Harbour and any number of American girls called Louise.

I was a passenger in a car that had a scaff pole go through the windscreen on the passenger side, immediately prior to it I had been dropped off as I forgot something and had to go home to get it. Took the headrest off the passenger seat, rear seat and went out the rear window.

Walking through a scenic gorge in Romania a bloody great big tree fell off the canyon wall above and landed in among us. It brushed passed the wife so closely it gave her a skint knee 8O. My mother in law dived out the way and suffered a broken collar bone. I got away with some (very minor) scratches from flying splinters.

A few seconds earlier or later or if we had been in a slightly different place on the trail and one or all of us could have ended up a red splot on the floor of the gorge.

When I think back the whole incident seems utterly unreal. The consequences of it going another way are just too hard to imagine.

Nico – Member

I decided never to go to America, and thus narrowly avoided 9/11, the Sandy Hook massacre, the St Valentine’s Day massacre, Little Big Horn, Pearl Harbour and any number of American girls called Louise.

Tragically, Nico was killed in the Bowling Green Massacre

Haha…. Another Louise…. Essex, this time.

Beautiful girl. Stunning.
Yep, same here, another Louise, also from Essex.

She was a redhead. The physical scars my heal but the mental ones go on forever 😉