Reports of my near demise are greatly exaggerated

DAVE MOORE

It appears that several people are convinced that I wrote off a brand-new Audi RS4 last Saturday. And this reminded me of those that accused me of destroying a Citroen C5 a couple of months ago.

My CEO told me on Monday that he was glad to see me 'in one piece.' Obviously he thought the ‘smash’ must have been quite serious, seeing as it involved the writing-off of one of the toughest and safest cars in the business.

Then a photographer mate asked me how I was, as he too had heard the same story, that someone from The Press had severely damaged an Audi while testing it. He'd heard it from a former policeman and friend of his, who'd got the story himself from a man who was still a policeman - on good 'authority,' you might say.

Obviously two and two came up as six and therefore it was yours truly who did the damage.

The Press's illustrations editor also asked me if it was true, but he had got it from the photographer and therefore I guess, indirectly, from a policeman too.

George, an old friend then called. I'm glad he phoned me and not my wife to be honest, imagine how she'd have felt, learning of a bad accident several days before that I hadn't admitted to.

'I heard you were just out of hospital on crutches,' he said, and immediately offered lift to anywhere I needed to go.

Nice feller, George, but it took a while to put him right, as it did with the others.

'IT WASN'T ME!' - sorry to shout - 'I DIDN'T SMASH ANYTHING, TRUST ME.'

It was a bit like the Citroen C5 smash, where another journalist was driven into by a plonker in an Isuzu Trooper, wrecking the C5 - the details appeared in his paper.

But oh, no, despite that 'paper naming the driver, I was accosted in a lift of all places and accused of being a reckless driver and I should be ashamed of crashing the car.

There was no convincing the lady, who was an old acquaintance, truth be known, and this was even after reminding her that I worked for Fairfax and that the publication the innocent C5 driver belonged to was not part of our group and was even regarded as a competitor.

But she wasn't having any of it. Ah well.

However, the more recent smash was a little different. I can't get the chap's name out of Archibald’s, the agents for Audi in my area. It appears to Archibald’s, with whom I have been dealing with very cordially for almost 30 years, that the real crash driver's anonymity is more important than my reputation and embarrassment in their eyes, even after I explained my situation. I might have to rethink my relationship with the company, now.

I think it's all a Chinese whisper, to be honest. It appears that it could have been someone overhearing snippets of a conversation, like: 'Crash,'.... 'Audi write-off', 'car writer'...', whereupon they named me as the, shall we say, obvious perpetrator.

Well, to badly paraphrase Mark Twain, all I can say is that reports of my near demise are greatly exaggerated.

But I'd love to meet the bloke who DID have the crash - writing-off an Audi is a very difficult trick and it's one I'd like to learn to avoid.