Crashing a car as a student put the fear of speed in me

OK, here’s what I remember. I was sitting in the back and my friend was driving, turning a corner on the way back from Beachy Head where the exorcism had taken place. I was 20. It was a warm and windy day, imprinted now with the kind of nostalgia that has you mistily telling children how when we were young we used to memorise phone numbers and use paper maps. We were studying together at art college, an experimental degree course that combined critical theory with material art-making and some delicious pomposity that resulted in things like: having this three-wheeled car ordained and exorcised before allowing it, unfortunately, to change my life forever.

A week earlier a production company had arrived at college, inviting us to take part in a reality makeover show. Two teams, the first made up of the well-dressed design students, the second, us, were each given a secondhand Robin Reliant and £500 in order to transform the cars before putting them up for auction. The team that made the most money was the winner. Perhaps I’ve told you this story before – the way they found us at exactly the right point in our lives, when we were acutely aware of the power we yielded with our citric youth and when we still believed in art, silliness, the divine.

Perhaps I’ve told you that, while we art students decided to transform our car’s soul (and, through a series of occasionally occult processes, including turning it into a confessional booth, rid it of its very “car-ness’ forever) what the design students did to their car was simply: paint it. What I will not have told you, because it was only this week that I realised it, when my editor invited me to go speeding round a race track for some reason, is that this single experience has led to me not only never learning to drive, but also made me a bad passenger who remains stupidly scared of going fast. Which old me, art student me, the me who merrily helped spend our £500 renovation money on vodka cranberries and zoomed round Brighton in heels as if it was burning, would be mortified to hear.

Anyway, we were on the way back from Beachy Head. The exorcist had met us there to cleanse the Robin Reliant of any bad spirits following our awkward afternoon with a psychometric reader up the coast, where a polite sex worker had asked us to move our little car on because its presence was disturbing the orgiastic vibe. Brighton is notoriously hilly, its streets falling sharply as you approach the seafront, and it was on one such road, near our halls of residence, that we turned a sharp corner and found ourselves suddenly flying. There was a moment of something like elation, a sharp, ice-like clarity, before the top of our roof skidded along the side of a parked car, careened on a single wheel into another parked car, then crashed very loudly into the front of a pub.

Up on Beachy Head, a chalk tower called the Devil’s Chimney had recently collapsed. A hundred years earlier Aleister Crowley predicted an evil spell would fall on the area if this tower ever crumbled and, while a TV company was handing us a car, a local white witch had been frantically conducting ceremonies to dispel evil. The ceremonies, we concluded as we crawled out of the driver’s door and into the pub, where the production company swiftly set up a tab, had failed.

A couple of days later we assembled at a car-breaker’s yard on the edge of town and watched as our ordained, psychometrically assessed, freshly exorcised and now shattered Robin Reliant was crushed to the size of a muscular torso, and with it my nerve. There had been no broken bones in the crash, no blood, just a little light whiplash and some terrible crunching sounds. I wasn’t to know for many years, though, that the lasting scar from this, the silliest of accidents, was my desperate grip on the passenger handle when being driven round corners, and my undignified impulse to avoid speed, instead, still moving through adulthood at the pace of honey or traffic. I wonder now who I’d be if the car had had four wheels, or if the corner had been nearer the cliff, or if the Devil’s Chimney had not collapsed. Needless to say, the design students won.

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