This morning on the way in to work, there were the usual garden-variety traffic jams, road blocks, diversions, invisible Men at Work (you can see the signs, but never the men. The only explanation is they're invisible. Personally, I would change the signs to Goblins at Work). Cars and their drivers were both frosty. Halfway into February, the sun still had its Out Of Office on, but there was the faintest whiff of spring in the air. It was either that or the air freshener in my car. (Long story but the essence is that this now works because my heating vents now work -hooray!-but then these probably work because the fans have unfrozen and that must mean that spring is indeed on the way.) Come on, Sun, stop slacking off and get to work!

Anyway, there I was, about ten miles in to my commute, singing along to Van Morrison and settling into auto-pilot when the dreaded flashing lights appeared in the distance... It meant only one thing. Major Accident. In my mind, I started the now familiar process of resigning myself to spending most of the morning in the car (hooray again for heating vents) when I noticed the lights were actually flashing on the other side of the road and it was the oncoming flow of traffic that was blocked, not ours. In a situation like this, I would normally just count my lucky stars (it's usually just the one star so it doesn't take too long to count) and then turn my focus back to covering as much distance as possible until the next incident on the road. This time, however, was slightly different. ..

A few years ago, when my fear of flying was at its worst, I was told by more than one person that travel by road was significantly more dangerous than air-travel, in terms of the odds of being in a fatal accident. I'm sure this little fact was meant to make me feel better at the time. Only problem is that these days, at 80 miles per hour, with the car in front swerving dangerously, and a fine mist forming across my windscreen, I suddenly wish I was in a plane.

Meanwhile at Junction 4, my car was still about 20 yards from the spot of the accident but I could tell it was serious. There were about three fire engines, two police cars and an ambulance. And smoke. Most likely, there was a fatality. As our queue of traffic inched slowly forward, I wondered whether it was purely a voyeuristic instinct that made people stop and stare, or whether there was something deeper going on; a collective realisation, perhaps, that that car could so easily have been ours, the people inside could just as easily have been us. Unconsciously, maybe both man and machine were coming together in a show of respect; taking a moment to whisper a prayer before moving on.

The fact is -without wanting to sound too dramatic- sometimes taking a car onto the motorway feels like the modern-day equivalent of taking a horse into battle. At any given time, people are up against some combination of fading light, mechanical failure, snow, fog, sleet, road-rage, fatigue, and speed guns. Every so often, you flirt with your own mortality. Not everyone makes it out alive, the rest merely live to fight another day.