BY the time I rounded the corner, history had been airbrushed and there was only a clean driving line through the sand to show for the unimaginable horror that had happened a few hours earlier. Although the deaths had occured a couple of hundred yards from my bedroom, I had slept through the event and had breakfasted through the emergency operation.

Indeed, the first I knew that anything was amiss was when I drew back the curtains and saw through the fog the arrival of the clean-up truck that spreads the sand in order that those drivers who follow don't slip on the spilled fuel.

So within hours all that remained was the driving line through the sand, and the word in the post office: an appalling, appalling tragedy; two lives lost and her heavily pregnant. And what about the vast holes ripped in the lives of those who remain?

Another fog-strangled day later, I take the A167 from Hurworth Place into Darlington, a two-and-a-half mile journey I drive there and back every day, at least 12 times a week, at least 600 times every year. It's a nice country A-road, a little twisty but pretty fast, which has killed four people in the last four years. I've lost count of the cars that've been caught in my headlights after they'd missed the corners and parked in the hedgerows.

I nearly over-shoot the corner where the accident happened as my eyes are drawn to the bouquets building up on the verge, a tearful dew collecting on the cellophane wrappings so you can't see the colours inside.

It is a strange phenomenon. Other European countries have roadside shrines to the Virgin Mary to bless travellers on their journeys; we have roadside shrines to those who came to grief.

Within 48 hours of the fatal crash on the Skerne bridge between Northallerton and Darlington, one person dies on the A1 in the North Yorkshire fog and seven are seriously injured; a lad is killed at Skelton; a driver dies in a beck near Stamford Bridge; four are seriously injured in an A19 fireball; a 79-year-old is seriously injured in Tyneside; a motorbiker is fighting for his life after crashing at Wingate; three are hospitalised at Guisborough, two at Stockton and one in Sunderland. Plus a woman is dragged under a bus and dies in Durham. Plus 600 cram into a church near Scarborough for the funeral of two youngsters killed on a Moors road.

Plus however many more that go unnoticed in the brief paragraphs in the papers. Every week in Britain, 69 people die on our roads; every year 3,580. In the North-East in 2001, 102 were killed and 1,043 were seriously injured. In Yorkshire and Humberside, 331 were killed and 3,380 were seriously injured.

The Government, quite rightly, debates its response to September 11 when less than 3,000 died and it announces, quite rightly, how it'll prevent another Selby railcrash in which only ten died. Only ten.

The rest of us rush madly back and forth along our roads, steering wildly to keep in the clean driving line in the sand while our eyes are drawn - magnetically and morbidly - to the decaying floral tributes wrapped in cellophane by the roadside.