Car accidents - is it just me?

As I settle down to this, the clouds have just opened, and it's looking close to the torrential rain that swept the roads last time I hired a car. I managed to get home safely, but I saw three car accidents along a stretch of the A27.

It's not just when it rains, though. It seems like every time I hire a car to drive around the country, there are delays and problems because someone else has been involved in a car crash. The first time, in fact, I was going from Scotland back to Preston, where I lived then, and a pretty serious collision had managed to flip a car onto its roof.

It can't have happened long before I passed, as it was still in the central lane and there was a scattering of glass across the area. Though I hope there were, I've never found out if there were survivors. If there had been, they'd almost certainly have been suffering some form of personal injury, whiplash at least.

And ever since then, it's felt like there's an accident whenever I drive anywhere at all.

Now, there is a logical explanation for this: I don't own a car, only hire one for big journeys, so I'm only ever driving long distances. And that's a set of circumstances which may make it more likely that I'd see a collision.

But I also tend to ignore most of the World Cup each time it's on, and the moment I watch an England game is the moment they fall apart and lose. And I was in a restaurant the other day when the credit card machine broke just as I was trying to pay.

So, does this make me some kind of jinx? I do worry about such things, sometimes. For all the Enlightenment values I've taken on, it's still very difficult to shake off the idea that things - car accidents, own goals, exploding cash registers - happen to me specifically, and therefore happen for a fated reason, and it's all spooky forces conspiring against me.

You see the same thing happening in Deal or No Deal, where the people are convinced they can affect the probability of the numbers they want coming up. As long as I'm sitting outside the programme, I know I'd just go round in numerical order to prove it's just maths.

But part of me also knows that if I were there, I'd find my faith in that shaken, and end up with a lucky gonk and rabbit's foot to show faith with Lady Luck as well.

For all those fears, one thing that working in a personal injury firm has taught me is that car accidents happen all the time, on roads I've been nowhere near, so that's at least one illogical fear I can scratch off my list, while I work to try to help the victims of their own crashes as they make a compensation claim.

Can I claim?