THE BUTTERFLY EFFECT

At some time before 3am this morning, just as I was dropping into sleep, a pedestrian was struck by a lorry on the motorway.

We don't know the details. It could have been a moment's lapse in concentration, or a drunken dare, or just a terrible accident in the fog.

Whatever happened, the impact has rippled into the lives of thousands of people this morning, many of whom are still stuck in traffic.

Later, as I was walking along the High Street, I saw a lady in a Jeep pulling out into the traffic jam. She was trying to squeeze through a gap left by a truck and the car behind it. It was a tight angle and she miscalculated. As she reversed, I could see the fresh white scratches down her indented driver-side door. The truck driver swung out of the cab and started to walk around the back to see what had happened.

A little further along, by the train of stationary traffic, a girl crossed the road and skipped onto the pavement. She stumbled slightly on the kerb and let out a small embarrassed yelp. She was alright, but I bet she was thinking about it for ages.

And then there were the thousands of people in their cars, listening to the radio, drumming their fingers on the steering wheel, phoning their bosses to say they would be late and sipping hour-old coffees.

Even here, now, half of the office are still on their way - thousands of hours, stuck on the road. These are ripples from a single event, a single individual, a micro-moment in history, a person making maybe the tiniest of decisions.

I myself, parked at the Intrepids' and walked in, like old times.

Shiny cars stacked up through the village, pumping condensation into the chilly air with engines idling.

This is the famous butterfly effect - the idea that chaos can grow from tiny changes. Everything is connected; every one is connected. Small decisions can have big consequences, like a butterfly flapping its wings and eventually causing a hurricane.

This makes me think that time is really a complicated network of cause and effect... singularities - things that happen, things that happen as a result of other things that happen and things that are prevented from happening by other things that happen. The girl stumbling on the pavement would not have been there had the accident not happened - and neither would I have been there to see her. The lady who scratched her Jeep would not be cursing herself this morning and the truck driver wouldn't have any complicated paperwork to fill out.

And these are only a few of the stories that interwove themselves around the village this morning. There was gridlock across the entire town - a tangle of interconnected tales, histories, triumphs and disasters.

The cobweb doesn't last long for most of us though. I'll have soon forgotten I was late, that lady will repair her Jeep and the girl on the pavement has probably already cracked on with some work.

But it's not temporary for all of us. There's a lorry driver in shock, and a family somewhere with some devastating news.

I got to work, just as the coffee van was packing up. Never one to miss an opportunity, the lady who runs it smiled at me and said, "Morning. Bacon roll?"

I don't much like the butterfly effect, I thought later, as I chomped through the dry, tasteless bacon and crumbling bread.