Nothing to see there!

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Not long ago, on a motorway journey, I suddenly noticed that the angle of my wing mirror didn’t seem quite right. I was sure I hadn’t changed it and yet it seemed to be facing more upwards than it should have been. I adjusted it a bit with the little lever, but a minute or two later I noticed it had happened again. Then I realised that the mirror was coming loose. Not the whole mirror assembly, but just the actual glass part was coming unstuck from whatever was behind it. I thought that if I opened the window, I might be able to grab hold of the edge of the mirror and pull it off before it fell, so I would be able to re-attach it later. But the instant I opened the window - maybe due to a change in the airflow over the car or something - the mirror was whipped off and flew up and behind me in a flash, followed by the tinkling sound of broken glass. Bother. I was driving on the motorway with nowhere to stop, except for the emergency ‘hard shoulder’, but this didn’t count as an emergency. And I still had the rear view mirror to see behind me through the back window so it should be OK - after all old cars didn’t have wing mirrors. So I carried on. The odd thing was that I was so used to glancing in the mirror that I kept doing it, and when I saw nothing (because just a black plastic casing there) my brain automatically thought ‘nothing there’. But seeing nothing because I couldn’t see it is of course not at all the same as seeing nothing because there was nothing there. After a few miles I decided it was just too dangerous to try to complete my journey (another hundred miles or so) without the mirror and I had to find a place to buy a replacement. Luckily that wasn’t too difficult, as it was daytime and the shops were open and it wasn’t too far to get to a place that sold car spares. It was a great relief to be back to ‘normal. I just thought it was interesting the way my brain automatically interpreted seeing no reflection as ‘OK’ due to years of habit. All rights reserved. © Text and image copyright Fleur 2021.