Image courtesy of Celia

The Slog's Tale

Will , the Lugless Slog , whose visage can be viewed on the left of the page ,was present when the beast hurled itself into the ditch and he provides these invaluable recollections to accompany Celia's photo.

 

Now, remember, if two people witness an event they will remember it quite differently, this event was witnessed by many more than that so .........this is how I remember it:
We had decided to cross the border from extramadura in Spain into Portugal and then drive straight down to Faro on the south coast to meet returning refugees (this must be January '85 - but I may be wrong). Yeah well..., over the border, me and Wonky in the Beast thinking "ok, first chance to stop
we'll pull over and make our plans for the rest of the day".

[ footnotes - (i) the beast was always 'point' vehicle', (ii) this was before the days of everybody having a mobile - and semaphore is dangerous, as well as difficult, from a moving vehicle].

Anyway, we drive into this village and it has a large town square so we pull over, park up and jump out of the beast and wait for everybody else to arrive. So, we're walking away from the beast and there's these Portugese guys on the other side of the road waving at us and pointing at the Beast, and we're going 'yeah, man - groovy paint-job whadduyareckonhuh?' - but there's something in their faces that says this isn't admiration and we turn round and there it is: our beloved Beast has jumped its handbrake and is heading towards its spiritual home - a freshly-ploughed field.

Now me and Wonks have the sort of hot-wired, problem-solving,ready-for-action-anytime brains you need in this situation, so we got to work - by our quick,on-the-spot, calculations with the Beast
weighing nearly a million tons and accelarating at close to 40,000 miles per second per second we would have to run at close to the speed of light to catch up with it, and we considered that after that kind of exertion we probably wouldn't have enough strength to pull the handbrake back on. So we
decided to just stand there and watch it hurtle axle-deep into freshley-turned soil. Well , what would you do?
coming soon - part 2, the rescue........