Five years ago I was struck at speed by a rusty old Ford Cortina on the always speedy one-way heading south from the Queens Gardens, and even now, I dart across roads like a wild-eyed rabbit.
For the first year, I would only cross at the lights, surrounded by other people.
I thought that was ethically sound.
After all, I had already been hit by a car.
If someone chose to walk on the outside of a group at the lights and was hit by a waterhead driver, then it was simply their turn.
It's called taking one for the team, and in life, we are all on the same team.
It had been a dank grey drizzling day, and as I spotted what I thought was a gap in the traffic, I walked across from the Guthrie Bowron paint shop carrying a huge pot of paint, staring into a raft of dank grey drizzling buildings, not noticing a dank grey drizzling Ford Cortina hurtling camouflaged at my tiny body.
Fortunately, I was swinging the huge can to mirror the jaunty feeling I constantly carry within, I was possibly also singing tra-la-la, and it was the huge can of paint on a forward swing that hit the car, the back door, which was smote something awful, and I was merely struck on the rebound, tumbling across the road and crashing into the gutter, where I lay inert, fearful I may have broken bones, or, oh my gosh, a broken spine.
In defence of Dunedin's motorists, they all tooted at my inert body as they sped on to their important destinations, except the driver of the Cortina, who finally managed to stop the speeding vehicle, as a train driver might finally stop a runaway train in a cowboy movie, and quickly raced to my side with that ageless Kiwi comment of concern - ''Oh MATE!!''
I was fine.
Heavily bruised but not broken.
More crucially, I had lost quite a lot of paint.
But my driver drove me home, nearly hitting a bus on Crawford St in a move I can really only describe as suicidal.
Not surprisingly, since that incident, I have been very wary crossing roads.
Every day I have to cross Princes St by the Market Reserve, which is an awfully long way between the traffic lights of Stafford St and Cargills Corner.
So I have to seek a tiny window between pelotons, and run for my life.
Fortunately, there are five phases at the Stafford St lights, so there is usually a gap after each Princes St phase.
Unless some interloper crawls out of a side street and occupies that space between pelotons to prevents my getting across.
A columnist on this page, let's just call him Bob Jones, wrote savagely of women drivers a few weeks ago, so both for that reason and for the fact my whole purposeful being is based on removing misogyny from life as we know it - I have replaced Diabetes and Kidney Transplant on my MedicAlert bracelet with Anti Misogyny - I will not name the gender of this driver, except to say he/she was travelling at the speed paint dries, hands clutching the steering wheel like a parent clutching a newborn baby.
Traffic from the Exchange due south was thus turned into an Auckland Motorway jam, and as I was carrying five very thick, heavy, glossy magazines and an even heavier boxed game called Mulligan (''A Must For Every Golfer'') from the Sally Army store, my arms were nearly falling off.
When I finally got to move, nearly two hours later, the used supermarket bag carrying the magazines broke and my intellectual reading was spread all over the road with hundreds of cars bearing down on me like bearing-down cars.
I was almost killed more than once.
I will say no more.
Except that the driver of the rusty old Ford Cortina was a man.
• Roy Colbert is a Dunedin writer.
