From The Seat Of Your Car

         You can hardly believe what you’re watching. It’s as if your windscreen was a television set.
         As you sit at this junction, your indicator still clicking as you wait to pull out safely, a messy crowd of paramedics and bystanders forms in front of you - all huddled around a twisted heap of bicycle.
         You sat and watched it all: the bus clipping her front wheel; the humiliating struggle she had put up with her handlebars, like she was trying to control an errant pneumatic drill; the good Samaritan who tried to help move her to safety but accidentally snapped her frail wrist putting her in the recovery position.
         And you know how ridiculous this sounds but you could swear that as they wheel the old lady, broken and barely conscious, into the back of the ambulance, she has weakly lifted her head to turn to face you directly and, with her wet, grey eyes, she is saying to you:

         I know that it was not you who knocked me down, but you sure as hell did not pick me back up again.

         It’s in that moment that you realise what you have done, and what you have failed to do, is something altogether worse.