Overview

I am driving along the Languedocienne motorway from Barcelona to Marseille, in the middle lane of three. The traffic is a solid line of sixteen-wheeled trucks, nose to tail, a couple of meters apart. In front of me is a Croatian truck: Engine parts from Zagreb. Behind me is a Spanish truck full of tomatoes. The lines of trucks stretch as far ahead, and as far behind, as the eye can see. From the crest of a hill, I can see hundreds of trucks flowing in each direction. A big Opel whooshes up from behind, in the fast lane. The driver, who is doing 200 kilometers (120 miles) an hour, is talking on a mobile phone. Suddenly, the Croatian truck veers left to avoid something. The Opel, startled, first bangs into the crash barrier and then, braking hard, swerves in front of the Croatian truck. Horns blare, brakes slam, wheels lock, tires smoke. We all stop. By a miracle there is no squashed car, and nobody is dead. The Opel has come to a halt between fifty thousand pounds of engine parts in front and fifty thousand pounds of tomatoes behind. I notice a slogan on the tomato truck: Trans-Inter: Your Partner in Closed Loop Logistics. The Opel driver has stopped talking on his phone thinking, perhaps, how close he came to closing his loop with all those tomatoes.

The shock of that near miss in France made me think that this was not the weightless new economy we were...