Excitement

There was a bit of untoward excitement here yesterday.

I was mowing the lawn when I heard a helicopter close by. Not an unusual event in itself, as James Dyson lives nearby at Doddington House and regularly uses a helicopter to travel to and from his home (and I don't think it's for trips to Waitrose). We also occasionally have Wessex, double rotor 'copters flying low over us for some reason. However, this got closer and closer.

On looking up I saw a chopper hovering maybe a hundred feet above me and I was convinced the bugger was about to land in our garden. I wondered if, perhaps, I was mowing the lawn in an illegal manner during lockdown and the rozzers were on to me. On closer inspection I noticed it was an Air Ambulance from Southmead Hospital in Bristol.

It continued very slowly over our garden and then proceeded to touch down on the common just the other side of our hedge. On rushing out to the drive I noticed there was a kerfuffle further up the road and there appeared to be an RTA with traffic was building up and a couple of ambulances were in attendance.

The casualty, which was a biker who had been pranged by a car turning into a drive, was taken away by a road ambulance and the chopper wasn't needed, but I took the following video of it departing.

A little later I had cause to go into my work, which is only a couple of hundred yards down the road, in the direction of the RTA, and asked the guys next door at KwikFit what had caused the accident. They said a motorbike had been hit and the culprit had fled the scene in his or her car.

Now our work site has CCTV, with one camera facing along the road in the direction of the accident. I alerted my boss and he looked through the footage, discovering that not only was the accident captured (although it was quite far away), but the fleeing car went pas our premises twice - once before the accident and then again when fleeing. While I could discern the car make and model, the registration was hard to determine.

Hay then contacted the police to inform them we had evidential footage, but rather than being put through to an officer to take a statement and accept the video evidence, she was incredulously sent an on-line form to fill in. We're still waiting to hear from the police.