Flood

This one went out on BBC Radio 2, so the discipline is to include the spiritual in an even more subtle way than on Radio Wales. The Good Samaritan is embedded in this.

I play bass guitar in a new rock n roll group and we’re all still wildly enthusiastic about it. The only problem is, we rehearse in a barn about ten miles from where I live and you need to take some pretty narrow and remote country roads to get there.

One evening we were going to practise but it had been raining hard for several days and there were flood warnings out all over Britain. My wife told me to have the night off but my fellow band members and I were adamant – we were all going to turn up no matter what.

My friend Richard is the lead guitarist and it was his turn to drive and we got about three miles out of the village, hit a wall of water and his engine died. We had no option but to climb out into about two feet of water and push the car off the road.

I’m with one of these roadside rescue organisations and they were quite happy to help me but because of the conditions everywhere there was a three hour wait. So Richard phoned our village and arranged for a friend with a truck to come and tow him back.

In the meantime, another car came along the road and killed his engine in the flood. It turned out to be someone I vaguely knew – Mike, a friend of my daughter’s from school. He didn’t know what to do in these circumstances and I felt really sorry for him.

This was my dilemma: I could either go back home straight away with Richard and his friend’s tow truck or stay with Mike and wait for the roadside rescue people to answer my distress call on his behalf because you need to be with the vehicle.

What came to my mind was that story in the Bible about the man who was mugged and left for dead and how nobody would stop to help him except a Samaritan – a man everyone else despised. On the back of that, I decided to stay with Mike.

My feet were cold and wet for all of three hours but we had a good talk about the old days and when I got home I realised that I had a great feeling from having done something to help that I didn’t really have to do if I didn’t want to.

Now all I need to do is cope with my smug, self-satisfied, proud attitude problem!