my most likely cause of death

Possibly my most likely cause of death is being struck by a vehicle while visiting the UK some time. There are two major factors at work here:

1. Anyone who lives in Egypt for a decade inevitably becomes an extremely aggressive pedestrian. There simply aren’t many traffic lights in the city, and courtesy by drivers toward pedestrians is unknown. My only rule of thumb is never to dash across in front of a bus, even if the bus is far in the distance. The reason is that you can’t always make it all the way across the road immediately, but sometimes you have to wait in the midst of traffic for a minute or so. By then the bus might have reached you, and it will have trouble stopping even if it wants to do so. A girl at the American high school in the Cairo suburbs was struck and killed by a bus a few years ago. And the dead body I saw covered on the Ring Road near the Carrefour, en route to the new campus, is reportedly a near-daily event out there. People dash from their apartment blocks across the road.

In any case, I am now an extremely aggressive jaywalker, simply because you cannot live in Cairo otherwise.

2. Combine my aggressive jaywalking with my American “the Brits drive on the wrong side of the road” mentality, and you have the makings of perilous brushes with death every time I am in this part of the world.

The two closest calls:

(a) Dublin, 2002, near the train station. I walked blithely across the street, not noticing a speeding car that missed me by only inches. A crowd of Irish people gasped aloud and a few even cursed to see me act so foolishly (in fact, I was looking the wrong way and didn’t even notice the car coming). For some reason an inner voice told me to appear cool and collected as though I had deliberately done the risky thing, and it was fun to watch their dropped jaws as I strolled calmly past them, pretending to be unconcerned by the fact that I was very nearly flattened. I was on my way to Belfast for the day.

(b) In London, near the Prime Minister’s residence on Downing Street, probably June 2006. For some stupid reason my body was about to step just into the street and then turn and look backwards before dashing across the road. Just before I did so, a double-decker bus blazed right past me. I would definitely have been flattened.

Because of those two incidents, I am now perhaps ultra-cautious in the UK when crossing streets, but still always feel like I’m on the verge of an absent-minded near miss.

One intersection very close to this conference had a warning sign stating that there had been 18 “casualties” at the intersection in the past three years. The icon on the sign was an upside-down car, which did give a fairly drastic impression of what the “casualties” might have been like.