Watching car crash compliations with my grandson

My boy was downstairs cooking Sunday roast. Earlier, I had been clambering about on a woodpile, stepped awkwardly, and twisted my knee. So I was upstairs lying on my bed stinking of Deep Heat. Then my grandson appeared in the doorway to report that lunch would be ready in an hour. I held out my arms to him. The lad dutifully removed his shoes and came and lay next to me. I cuddled him passionately until he’d had enough of it, then I reached for the iPad and asked him what he would like to watch on YouTube.

‘Car crashes,’ he said. Apart from making Batman attack vehicles out of Lego, watching car crash compilations on the iPad is our current favourite pastime. It’s better than coke. The best of the compilations are Russian. My goodness there are some lunatics on the road over there. Driving in Russia is so dangerous that for legal and insurance purposes every car has a permanently switched on webcam fixed on the road ahead. And some enterprising persons have strung together the best of the best smashes and posted them online.

We lie on our backs. He rests his head against mine. I hold the tablet about nine inches in front of our faces. United in the intensity of our imaginations, we look through the screen as though it is our car windscreen and we are actually driving. Each clip lasts about 30 seconds. We might be driving, for example, along a two-lane expressway, in the right-hand lane, in a line of traffic travelling a steady 40 mph. The landscape is flat, the road is dry, the sun is shining. There is usually a soundtrack. Russian pop music is playing soporifically on the car radio and there is an occasional swish of a car going by in the opposite direction.