Could have been much worse!

It is clear to me that I have offended the motoring gods and yesterday they sent me a warning!

Rosie and I were travelling north on the M1 yesterday lunchtime; heading for Nottingham to collect more of her stuff to move into my flat. I was driving and just South of Leicester, as I pulled into the middle lane to overtake a horse box, I heard a loud bang. Looking round I saw dust and smoke coming from the right hand side of a white transit van that had just overtaken us in the right hand lane.

As we watched the van swung sharply to the left across in front of us at a complete right angle to the road as it crossed the the middle lane, sliding sideways at at least 60mph. It narrowly missed the rear of the horse box and continued to slide, somehow staying upright, and by the time it ploughed into the foliage beyond the hard shoulder it had turned a complete 180 degrees and was travelling backwards. The van was alongside us by this point, and must have been doing about 50mph at the moment of impact.

The whole thing was over so quickly and yet it happened in a kind of curious slow motion. It was incredibly cinematic, almost like watching a cinema screen, probably because it was so dramatic, so large, and so out of the ordinary. The crystal clarity of it all was surreal, and despite the fact it happened a mere 25m ahead of us we looked on with a strange sense of detachment. There wasn't even any need for me to take evasive action, even though I was ready to, the van cleanly missed us and everything else on the road to make possibly one of the softest 50mph crashes in history.

It is a fact that travelling in a car is one of the most dangerous things that most people do on a day to day basis. This isn't something that most people are inclined to believe however, probably because inside our metal boxes the danger seems so distant. Even as I watched this accident unfold and two tonnes of metal whirled across the road completely out of control in front of me I didn't feel afraid. The realisation that things could have come off much, much worse is one that's entirely rational.

Perhaps the most shocking thing that came from this whole episode, I believe, is what happened when we went to the police station to make a statement as witnesses to what had happened. We were greeted by a locked front door and a sign listing opening hours, saying that the police station was closed all day.

It seems that the police are closed on Sundays.