Nash was always good-looking and his quiet, considerate demeanour assured him an Olympian success rate with women.

Like all my friends at that time, he was married to a Dane.  It was as if the Danish government had emptied the old-style asylums in favour of care in the community, and shipped a job lot of the borderline criminally insane to Britain at a knock-down price.

Robin lived with his Dane near Bracknell, about thirty miles from London down the M3.

He shared desk-space with me and a couple of other freelancers in a Soho basement. He was seeing someone even more mad than his wife. Kate would call him in our dungeon at 4pm and make unreasonable demands: “Nash, come here and fuck me right now!” was a recurring one.

Robin would replace the receiver with a sigh, tidy his desk in his meticulous way and smile apologetically. “Terribly sorry, chaps.  Duty calls.”

It was after one such evening of champagne-fuelled debauchery that he set off down the motorway in his race-prepared BMW.  And when he woke up, it was on its side on the hard shoulder.

The roll bar and racing harness had served him well – he was completely unharmed.  Unlike the central barrier, which was a highly-incriminating tangle of steel.

He managed to right the car (boundless is the strength of a frightened man) and limped home with a crab-like sort of motion, for the chassis was buckled beyond repair.

In the morning he was horrified to see that the BMW was missing a registration plate. Once the police found it, they’d be around with a repair bill for the barrier, if not a summons for leaving the scene of an accident. 

With a muttered excuse to the Dane, he jumped into her Renault 5 and hammered down the M3 in the rush hour traffic, looking for the wreckage on the central reservation.

To his surprise, he was overtaken by a wheel that bobbed jovially by then leapt over a hedge and out of sight. “Someone’s lost a wheel,” he observed. And then, as the Renault lurched violently and slewed across two lanes of traffic in a shower of sparks, he added, “It’s me.”

It was a miracle he didn’t kill himself and a hundred innocent by-drivers in an Armageddon of blood, fire and mangled metal. But once again, he wound up on the hard shoulder in a wrecked car, entirely without scathe.

The next day was Saturday. Nash bummed a lift to Wycombe Air Park to fly the single-engine light aircraft that was his pride and joy.

After a pleasant and restorative flight he touched down on the grass runway. As he was taxiing to the apron, he hit a boggy spot and the wheels sank in. The nose went down and the prop hit the ground, buckling the prop shaft and destroying the engine. The plane toppled to starboard and the wing snapped off.

Nash stepped out of the smouldering cockpit with as much dignity as it was possible to muster. He stood and surveyed the remains of the aircraft he’d lovingly built with his own hands.

The tally now stood at two cars and a plane in a little under 36 hours.

“I must have stood there for half an hour, just staring,” he told me. “Then I just thought, fuck it, and I walked across the runway to the bar.

“It was the only thing to do in the circumstances.”