THINGS are never quite what they seem, and the obvious is not really obvious at all.

Living in the South of France does not appear to involve spending every day sitting around a swimming pool sipping cool cocktails or being waited on by scantily-clad beauties (unfortunately). Also, the roads with very little traffic are not as safe as you might assume, as my friend and colleague Patrice, the no-longer-quite-so-melancholy since finding love with a Spanish girl nearly half his age plumber can testify. I think he can dispel the first part of the myth because he spends half his life on the end of a huge drill, making pipe runs in metre-thick walls, and the other half of his time with one of his hands down a U-bend, leaving precious little quality cocktail and pool time, and last Friday he found to his cost the danger of a quiet road.

He was toddling back up a steep hill from Gaillac – I know he was toddling because I followed him once, and if he hadn’t been in a van I would have sworn he was a little old lady on her way back from a piano recital at the church on a Sunday. He was nearing a blind bend at the crest of a hill when his entire field of vision, which should have been filled by an empty road stretching out in front of him, was filled by an Opel Corsa.

The Corsa had been following a lorry and the driver had become impatient and decided to overtake on the brow of a hill and on a blind bend. On most roads in the UK this would be unthinkable at any time other than the small hours of Christmas Day, because you would know for a fact that somebody would be coming the other way and you would be meeting your maker quite soon after some serious pain. Not so down here, traffic is sporadic and light to non-existent, white lines rare, police even rarer, and driving skills reflect this.

As the Corsa hurtled towards Patrice he said that he saw his life flash before his eyes. One can only hope that some of the more melancholy episodes were edited out and the more recent ones censored. Luckily for Patrice his instincts were more learned than instinctive. Apparently, when faced with an immediate danger of impact the natural human instinct is to turn to the left, making British roads safer, and if Patrice had followed his instincts he would have missed the Corsa and welded himself to the lorry. As it was, he pulled to the right and dumped his van into a handily-placed drainage ditch while suffering nothing more serious than a bent van and steering rack and a severe case of anger, which he was then able to vent on the driver of the Corsa, who at least had the decency to stop. In fairness to the Corsa driver, he had a fair defence – he said that he didn’t see Patrice. As it was a blind bend on the brow of a hill, he couldn’t have, but I’m not quite sure if the truth is an adequate defence in this case. The lorry driver said that he closed his eyes when he saw what was happening: again, not so reassuring that these kind of people are on our roads. I think the lesson learned by all concerned is that just because 99 times out of 100 there is nobody coming the other way, it only takes that one time to ruin your day. And before it flashes in front of you eyes, make sure the highlights of your life are worth watching again.