I have been saying for some time that tractor drivers are the biggest threat to my safety.

I was in hospital a couple of years ago after a big off. Another guy on the ward had been walking a country lane when a tractor came round a corner and took him out. He knew it was coming but there was nowhere for him to go.

True a badly driven car might have had the same effect, and I sure there are many careful tractorists etc. But the story scared me.

I don’t drive many of the local lanes these days, mainly because my new car is ten inches wider than my old one, and trying to manoeuvre a vehicle that’s practically touching the sides with no passing places and steep banks and/or walls either side just makes me far too wary about meeting sometime bigger then me on a tight bend, with nowhere to go, except try to reverse backwards along a quarter mile or more of almost blind lane. Some people absolutely will not back up, even with a passing place thirty feet behind with a dead straight reverse down a bit of a hill, expecting me to reverse up a 1:6 hill around a blind bend with the nearest other passing place a quarter of a mile up the hill – if a tractor and trailer had come down, I’d be totally flattened.