When should you get out of a broken down car? How dangerous are hard shoulders?

Problem
Your car breaks down or is hit. Should you get out?

When my car was hit in the slow lane of the M4 it shot across the middle and fast lanes, hit the barrier, revolved and stopped. A lorry driver ran up and told me to get out of the car. The right-hand doors were not operating. He came round to the front passenger and helped me out.

There's nowhere to stand along the barrier. I thought we might be hit, by something hitting the car stopped behind me pushing that car forward, like a row of dominos falling.

I asked him to move his truck across the fast lane.

He ran back and moved it diagonally across all three lanes. (Nobody was going anywhere forwards.  Cars could not overtake the accident. The other damaged car was stopped in the slow lane. Parts of my car were in the central lane.)

Later I learned that it is standard practice to move a large vehicle diagonally to block all lanes. It is big so its a barrier to smaller cards which can't shunt it. It's double height and can be seen. The fact that's it is diagonal blocks more than one lane. The fact that it can be seen from a distance as diagonal tells you that you cannot go forward and that something is amiss. 

I had been wondering what the statistics were on accidents.


'... since 2011, more than 20 people have been killed or seriously injured on hard shoulders.'

Read more: http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-5290983/Smart-motorway-horror-sees-lorry-crash-familys-car.html#ixzz54iXKntOv
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More Russian Letters to Learn Alphabet A-U.

The Cyrillic Alphabet

The English alphabet, written in Latin script, starts ABCDE. The Russian letters go ABvgDE.

The two dots above the second E remind me of little yo-yos or eyes. The sound is Y.  

Next, comes a complicated looking letter. I imagine a trapped fly getting angry trying to find its way out. Zch! The next letter like a reversed e or a long-tailed lower case z in gothic script still traps that angry fly - Z!

K is easy, same sound as in Kick. 

In English we have KLM. The next three letters are the same in the Russian alphabet. As usual, the Russians are like the R in toys R us. The L is reversed, or like a gothic L, starting with a fancy curve.

M is M.  Next tomes N. Except that the Russian scientist, a very fussy man, doesn't like diagonals so he has straightened it out with a bar.

Forget the letter Q. The next letters sound like the English, OPRS. The P is like a goal post.

Easy to remember from the railway station sign for the word park. 

The R was made by the Russians rushing to complete the theatre set.  The R is missing the last diagonal and looks like a P. (The don't need a P because they already had it in the last letter.) Alternatively, remember PR, the initials for public relations, when you see the letter P in Russian it's the same as an English R.

The next letters in the English alphabet are STU.

The sound S is written with a C like the C in the English words place and palace and police. (The Russians already have K for the English c sound.) 

After t comes U. In Russian written with a Y shape like Yew and You. 

See Wikipedia to hear the sounds.

That's enough for one lesson. In lesson one, we dealt with five Russian letters, ABVG and SH! 

Lesson two another few, from lines one and two: D Y Z.

I decide to teach the English alphabet to Russian children so I write what looks like an H with a slanting line, and copy it into a piece of scenery for a theatrical play, with hinges. An efficient Russian workman comes along and snaps it shut, forming what the Russian children in the audience now think is an I sound.

Time for a coffee break. Come back to the next post for some more Russian letters.

Author

Angela Lansbury, travel writer and photographer, author and speaker. Teacher of English and other languages. See my previous posts on learning Russian. Please bookmark your favourite posts and follow me and share links with your family and friends.

PS - Watch out for my two new travel websites coming soon. One will be on destinations. The other will be on what to pack and wear. I shall announce it on one of my posts on this website within a week. This website has the words Angela Lansbury and travel. One of the new ones will contain the word travel.