Cars no more affect climate change than do tumble driers. The cycle of climate change we are presently experiencing has occurred several times before - long before cars, long before people. We should be spending our money not on trying – Cnut-like - to prevent the inevitable, but on finding ways to live with the foreseeable and predictable changes.

I thought I’d seen it all on Monday, when the North Downs turned into one giant ski slope, and even ambulances crashed off-piste.

But yesterday was worse. The snow – although still in evidence – had stopped, er…snowing, and instead we had thick fog. 50-metre thick fog – that’s 4 coach lengths – and thickening.

Or sickening, I should say, at least when it came to the crazy, mindless antics of people who were driving in appalling visibility yet gave not a single thought to switching on their car headlights. Although judging by the majority of culprits, my guess was that they did think, and thought “Am I bovvered?’

About one car in ten loomed suddenly out of the fog with not so much as a nite lite in the window. About half the rest though that side lights would do, which, considering the conditions, would be like trying to land a Jumbo at night on a couple of bicycle lamps. And the silly thing is, the drivers had gone to the trouble of switching on some sort of lighting and then presumably decided that switching on their headlights would be a waste of a good battery. This despite the fact that they must have realised from the fellow idiots coming towards them that side lights simply could not compete with the fog.

I’ll give you one guess and at which combination of car and driver made up the greatest number of offenders – and I saw hundreds of cars without lights, by the way, so my observation and sampling was sound.

Fiat 500 Cabrio prototype recharging

Rumours abound re the forthcoming open-topped version of the Fiat 500.

The latest is that Fiat may offer a plug-in electric version.  An eagle-eyed reader spotted this apparently undisguised prototype during a break in warm weather testing in the Canaries.

The cable to the left of the picture is the big giveaway, suggesting that the baby Fiat was on charge while the test drivers grabbed a spot of lunch.