Wheelistically @ Claire.NU

I’d already writ­ten the post I was plan­ning to pub­lish today. How­ever, upon read­ing the head­lines on this morning’s paper, my mean­der­ings about my hair seemed wildly inappropriate.

In case you’ve been liv­ing in a cave over the last 24 hours, you will have heard the dread­ful news that Top Gear’s cheeky chappy Richard “Ham­ster” Ham­mond was involved in a stunt that went hor­rendously wrong dur­ing the film­ing of an epis­ode of my all-time favour­ite motor­ing show.

Accord­ing to vari­ous news sources, Ham­mond was driv­ing a “Vam­pire”, a jet-powered vehicle, with the inten­tion of unof­fi­cially attempt­ing to break the Brit­ish land speed record, when he was involved in a ser­i­ous crash and had to be air-lifted to Leeds Gen­eral Infirm­ary. The latest reports say that Ham­mond may have sus­tained ser­i­ous brain injury.

I’m gut­ted. I know I never met him, but I watch him every week — the banter that exists between him, Clark­son and May is TV gold. His school-boy mis­chie­vi­ous­ness, cheeky wit and immense enthu­siam for what he talks about sets him apart from other presenters. His risk-taking and anim­ated nar­ra­tion allows those of us who sat at home, to almost feel as though we’re sat in the pas­sen­ger seat next to him, our knuckles turn­ing white whilst our fin­ger­nails dive into the meta­phor­ical seams of the car seat.

I’m stunned. I hope so much, for the sake of his wife and two little girls, that he makes a sig­ni­fic­ant recovery.

If there are any fans here of “Ham­ster” (and his Halogen-like pearly-whites ) that would like to send their best wishes, pray­ers and “happy thoughts” to Richard and his fam­ily, visit this story on the Top Gear web­site and leave your mes­sage — they prom­ise to for­ward them all to the Ham­mond fam­ily as soon as its appro­pri­ate. (Reportedly, over 4000 mes­sages have been received already.)

Take care Richard, here’s to a sucess­ful and speedy recovery.

Image © BBC.com