So today, I was floating happily through classes up until just before lunch time, which was the first point at which I had to write the date. I kind of miss, back when we wrote notes on paper, the hourly ritual of remembering and writing the date in the margin of my book. I love hand-writing stuff, especially dates, but its all on my laptop now. Anyhow, I had to write the date, at which point I realized that it was the last day of March. Several minutes later, the implications of this came crashing down like a rather cliched tonne of bricks. Tomorrow is simultaneously the start of BEDA (Blog Every Day in April), my little brother’s birthday (he’s twelve), Fred and George Weasley’s birthdays (I’m a dork), April Fools Day (Sacred Day of Pranking People), and Friday on which we must get down, according to Rebecca Black (I couldn’t resist). Oh, and I’m going to Microsoft on a geeky excursion, and play with Kinect. So that’s exciting.

Basically, the arrival of April means I have a tonne of things to be doing, and thankfully, very few of them are school-related. I hand in my last assessment for the term tomorrow, which is a relief. And to clear things up, yes, I am definitely doing BEDA. If you are too, or you know anyone who is, let me know in the comments and I’ll do my best to read and comment every day, although realistically, that might not happen.

I had a bit of a thought-provoking experience today. The bus I took to school almost hit a little boy, and at the speed we were going, he would have been at least seriously injured, if by some incredibly lucky chance he wasn’t killed. It was that close, and seeing the expression on the kid’s face as he jumped to safety was quite jarring.

The bus was pulling around a corner from a busy highway onto a four-lane main road, and the traffic was moving quite quickly on both. As we swung around the corner, a boy, no older than ten, ran out in front of us, as if he was going to cross the road. If the bus driver hadn’t braked suddenly at the same time that the boy jumped backwards, we would have swung around and knocked him down, then gone over him. I shudder to think what that would have been like, because I would have seen it all from my window seat. The bus driver swore and blasted the horn, and after a moment of shock, the little boy scrambled back onto the pavement and went and sat down kind of shakily by the road. The look on his face was awful. I think he realised how close he had come to being killed, which is a terrifying thing for a little kid.

It worries me that a little boy was trying to cross a busy main road without supervision or traffic lights at peak hour, though. He wasn’t with anyone – there were no parents or siblings or even other kids from his school around. I definitely wouldn’t let my kid walk to school himself at that age, not in a busy neighbourhood like that. I mean, imagine if the bus driver’s reflexes had been a second slower. That kid would have been flattened. I would have felt the shudder of the bus as it crunched over him. The bus driver would probably be plagued with guilt, all of the bystanders would have had to cope with seeing the kid’s body once the bus moved away, and his parents would have to deal with a message that their child was dead. All because he couldn’t cross a road safely, and no-one was supervising him.

It was very scary. I hope the kid is smart enough not to try it again, or that someone can be spared to look after him on his way to school. Because if he had died, it would have been such an unnecessary death.

Have any of you ever seen anyone nearly killed?