A time near to now

It happened just before 4 p.m. on Friday, 22 August, after a brief thundery shower. The end-of-week traffic had packed the M4 in
both directions, heavy enough to hold cars in the fast lane just within the speed limit, light enough to keep all three lanes moving.
Viewed on the CCTV cameras, everything looked orderly and under control.
At one minute to four, a lorry travelling eastwards towards London appeared to swerve suddenly, and then accelerated towards
the central reservation, cutting through it with lethal force – and then turned in on itself, its trailer twisting and half-rearing before
falling onto its side, slithering along the road into the oncoming traffic and finally coming to a halt just short of the hard shoulder.
Where it burst open, not only the doors, but the roof and sides, discharging its burden of freezers, fridges, washing machines,
dryers, some tossed into the air with the force, some skidding and sliding along the motorway, a great tide of deadly flotsam, hitting
cars and coaches in their path.
A mini-bus driving westwards in the fast lane became impacted in the undercarriage of the lorry; a Golf GTi immediately behind it
swung sideways and rammed into one of the lorry’s wheels. A vast unyielding dam of vehicles braking, swerving, skidding, was formed: growing by the moment.
Back on the eastbound side of the carriageway, the cars immediately behind the lorry smashed into it and one another; one hit the central reservation so hard it became embedded in it, and the dozen or so after that, with an advantage of perhaps two or three seconds’ warning, crashed into one another relentlessly but comparatively harmlessly, like bumper cars in a fairground.
The freezers and refrigerators continued on their journey, more slowly now, but still with lethal effect; one car hitting them head-on
made a 180-degree turn, and was struck by an oncoming motorbike; another shot sideways and hit the central reservation.
Up and down on the road, then, stillness formed and a strange semi-silence overtook the scene, engines stopped, horns hushed . . .
but soon to be replaced by other hideous sounds, of human screaming and canine barking, and through it all the absolutely
incongruous noise of music from car radios.
And then a mass of mobiles, in hands that were able to hold them, called the police, the ambulance service, called home. And
even as they did so, the chaos spread out its great tentacles, reaching far, far down the road in both directions so that hundreds
were unable to escape from it.
Within the space of perhaps thirty or forty seconds, chance – that absolutely irresistible force – had taken its capricious hold on the
time and the place. It had disrupted the present, distorted the future, replaced order with chaos, confidence with fear and control
with impotence. Lives were ended for some, changed forever for others; and a most powerful game of Consequences was set in train.