The Near Miss.

The route from my village to Uttoxeter begins with a narrow country lane of around two miles in length. The width varies from place to place and has quite a few blind bends, so a certain amount of caution is required. I drove it this morning.

The day was fine and dry with a low, bright sun shining from an almost wholly blue sky. It’s the sort of condition which produces the brightest highlights and the deepest shadows, and even at midday – the time I usually go to Uttoxeter – the sun is low enough to require the use of the car’s visor to keep the blinding sun out of one’s eyes.

And then there is the problem of road glare. We’d had rain the previous night and so the road was damp. That problem is best addressed with the wearing of polarising sunglasses because they’re the best at reducing glare. But the problem with sunglasses of any kind is that they make everything else darker too, and so anything in a shaded spot is almost invisible.

I was driving around a right hand blind bend when I saw her: an elderly lady only just visible in the gloom bestowed by the shadow of a hedgerow tree. She was walking towards me along the edge of the lane and my driver’s door was level with her before I knew she was there. Had she been only a little further out into the lane my car would have hit her before I’d even had reason to brake. I was driving more slowly than usual but it would still have been an awful accident.

And so there was a lesson to be learned on both sides. To a driver one would have to say: ‘be very, very careful when negotiating a bend that’s in shadow.’ And to a pedestrian one might refer to Eric Idle’s famous song beginning Always look on the bright side of life. Maybe somebody should record a new version for us country dwellers beginning Always walk on the bright side of the lane.