I just heard that hideous noise: the out-of-control screeching of tires and the final sickening thump, followed by car horns and frantic shouting.

I live on a main road, and sometimes I hear the screech and I cringe for the thump but get nothing. Today, it was the most godawful whack. I went outside and there were (why are humans like this?) instantly dozens of people on the scene, frozen in a mixture of confusion and genuine horror.

There was a motorbike on the road, hurled into the traffic, and - after a ghastly couple of seconds - a man scrambling up from it, limping, swearing, lurching around in circles while a terrified bloke in a pink shirt sprinted from his offending vehicle and copped a serve. Whatever else he's feeling now, relief that the bloke was yelling at him rather than dying on the road must be up there in the top three.

Anyway, the point of mentioning this is that I cannot for the life of me remember what I thought was so important about only having the use of one arm for the last six weeks. Given that I, as a driver of a car, could blind-spot a motorcycle and end up in thirty degree heat blowing into a breathalyser and explaining what went wrong to the cops, I'm pretty sure a broken arm and inability to write is a fairly unimportant non-historical event in the scheme of things.

So I hereby retract... actually no I don't, I just acknowledge. I acknowledge that life is fairly random but sometimes not very random. When I was out the front of my house, swearing I would never drive a car again and watching the firemen sweep up the glass, I reached into the letterbox and got the mail. In it, a letter for me congratulating me on my driving record over the last three years and awarding me with a discount on license renewal.

I'm fairly sure that if that entire episode was a short story, the editor's note would be: too obvious.

Anyway, I'm off to renew my license, with a bit of trepidation and a thirty-six dollar discount. The "Arrive Alive Scheme" letter could not have had better dramatic timing.

In other news, anyone wanting to read the gorgeous Anthony Lane on the genuinely bizarre Walt Disney (and I count myself among you) go here.