Stay Another Day: Why one simple man’s thoughtless deed should be honoured by the nation

As a fairly solitary atheist, I’m not given many chances to celebrate a public holiday in honour of a great man – Christmas is a wondrous occasion as everybody’s off at the same time, but apart from remembrance day, I don’t feel this country makes enough of an effort to honour its all-time greats, and even remembrance day apparently doesn’t warrant a public holiday. In America, several presidents’ birthdays are public holidays. Then there’s stuff like Martin Luther King Day, Hulk Hogan Day, whatever. We don’t have anything like that. I really think we should. And I think that day should be today.

There was, in relatively recent times, a deed so awe-inspiring and joyous that I am constantly buoyed by it. I muster the courage to face a decaying world thanks to the one – entirely accidental – action of a seemingly ordinary man. In fact, so extraordinary was this deed that I suggest it is the deed we truly honour rather than the mortal, fleshly conduit through which it was bestowed upon us.

Today is the fourth annual National Brian Harvey Ran Himself Over With His Own Car Day.

There is nothing about that sentence that doesn’t lift my spirits immensely and inspire me to go out into the world and do good. Brian Harvey ran himself over with his own car. I was smiling as I typed it.
On May 31st 2005, Brian Harvey was reversing his Mercedes, and in some unfathomable stroke of idiocy, managed to turn his own automobile into a weapon, with which he struck himself down. When I first heard it, I immediately assumed it was a joke – after all, Monty Python had one of their Upper Class Twit Of The Year contenders run themselves over, and how we laughed at this seemingly impossible act of daftness. Except this happened, to a real person. And as a result of this vaguely existential conundrum, Brian Harvey – the man who ran himself over with his own car – was horrifically injured. From a BBC article:

“I had just been stuffing my face with a load of jacket potatoes and I felt sick, so I opened my car door to be sick.” the singer explained.

“Instead of putting my foot on the brake, I put it on the accelerator and it flew back. I must have hit four or five parked cars.”

Which of course adds another delicious twist to this already absurd scenario. Brian Harvey ran himself over with his own car – fine – because he had eaten too many jacket potatoes. He went on to further explain:

“My stomach was pushed into my lungs, which collapsed, and I was told the heel of one of my feet was found up round the back of my head.”

I’m hard pressed to conjure up an image more bizarre than the one this scenario presents me with. The only though I’m left with, once the laughter temporarily ceases, is that I – a man who has never taken a driving lesson in his life and doesn’t like jacket potatoes as it is – could reverse a thousand cars and eat a thousand jacket potatoes, and I’m fairly sure no combination of the two would ever lead to me running myself over with my own car. Which is exactly why I suggest we celebrate this incredible slap to the face of conventional wisdom, this gargantuan stomp to the tender testes of common sense, this vigorous flicking of the Vs to the very idea of what is and is not possible as far as Mercedes and jacket potatoes are concerned. Because in injuring himself in this way, Brian Harvey has inspired us all to better ourselves. He has shown us that conventions are there to be broken, that our only real limitation is our own imagination, and that the limitations imposed upon us by the world are there to be stuffed full of jacket potato and driven over, until we reverse into the five parked cars of our dreams.

Please understand I don’t wish Brian Harvey any specific ill – he was in a boy band and he went on a reality TV show, but so what. He’s still a man with feelings and emotions, and a spine that I understand was badly damaged in the accident, alongside every other tissue, organ and bone in his body. The man is not why we celebrate. We celebrate because Brian Harvey ran himself over with his own car.

Never forget.

John Tucker

Further reading:

The original article
Later article in which jacket potatoes are identified as the culprit