Here I am, heading down the motorway again back to Galway, enjoying the last bit of dual carriageway I’m going to get for another 150km or so, and I notice that either I’m going blind, or my headlights are shafted. I struggle on, but once I hit Fermanagh and the tail lights in front of me melt away, I realise if I don’t wash the muck off the headlights soon, I’m going to drive straight through a hedge. Then on cue, the windscreen washers run out of juice and I can’t see anything at all. So I stop in the usual garage in Enniskillen and head for the water tap.

In this case it really is a tap. Most petrol stations have a pistol thing on a hose, but this one has a big standpipe and a plastic watering can that’s been driven over so many times it holds a quarter of its original capacity and leaks like a flowerpot. The car gets a wash and a drink, half of it straight over the engine block and flashing to steam, and I head into the shop to buy chocolate for myself and some washer detergent for the car.*

I’m a hundred metres up the road before it hits me that I put the detergent in the expansion bottle. I end up spending twenty minutes flushing the bubbles out of the coolant system with the flower-pot watering can, while trying not to slip on the rapidly forming ice sheet beneath.

Plonker.

I’m now quite late and heading over the border into Leitrim, where the Gards are using their blue flashing cats-eyes to warn of black ice on the freshly relaid, mirror-smooth road surface. The road gritters have been working all afternoon north of the border, but it’s immediately obvious their southern counterparts are all on holiday, or in bed, or drunk under a table somewhere.

Filling up in Collooney**, I smell warm rubber – the front tyres look a little deflated. This particular garage has an insane compressed-air apparatus that won’t clip to my tyre valves properly and I can’t hold on by brute force because the button is on the wall and only works while you hold it in.

Three and a half hours into what is rapidly becoming a four and a half hour journey, it comes to my attention that there is a light somewhere illuminating the inside of my car and flashing irregularly. My first instinct is that somebody behind is taking the mick, but a glance in the rear view mirror shows only a distant car behaving quite sensibly.

What is that flashing? It’s not anything inside the car. The guy behind isn’t flashing his lights or bounci… holy shit, where did he come from?

Right in front of me, a car has appeared out of a side road and is doing about 30km/h. I’m doing 120, and there’s another car coming the other way.

Drop anchor, hold on and pray.

It takes me another couple of km to calm down. Then I work out that the flashing light is the trees passing in front of the nearly-full moon.

This driving is going to kill me.

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* Lacking sterling cash, this was bought with a ten-euro note that they gave me last year’s exchange rate for. Mutter.

** No, I didn’t fill up in Enniskillen – petrol is still much cheaper south of the border.