The buzz on the A-road

A Tuesday, a month or so on. You get in the car, the phone's in your hand from the call you just finished, and you open the glovebox and put it in without thinking about it, because that's where it goes now. Seat belt. Engine. The high street, the lights, third car back. Your hand goes to the cupholder, still, sometimes, and finds the empty plastic, and comes back to the wheel. The light goes green.

The A-road. Fifty. A buzz, muffled, from the glovebox. Something in you sits up, the same something that always did. And then it sits back down, because there's nothing to do about it. The road straightens and empties, and it's the safe moment, and you notice it's the safe moment, and you notice that noticing it is a thing you used to do just before looking. You don't look. There's nothing to look at. The road stays the road for the whole forty-five metres.

There's a lay-by two miles on. You could pull in. You think about it for a second and decide the message can wait for the car park at the other end, which is nine minutes off, and it's a decision you can make now, at fifty, because the phone isn't asking you for one. Nine minutes later, handbrake on, you get it out. It was your friend asking if you're around at the weekend.

That's the whole of it. Not a story about a near miss, because there wasn't one, and there wasn't one in the thousand before either. Just a drive where the phone stayed where it was, the itch arrived and left, and you arrived with twenty minutes of one thing behind you.

One action, if you're going to do one. The next time you get in the car, before the seat belt, put the phone somewhere you can't reach it. Don't decide about the rest yet. Just do that, once, and see what the drive is like.