Only a proper shock can jolt Britain out of comfortable decline

Fifty years ago I was hitchhiking down the Eastern Seaboard towards Miami overnight. It was midwinter, icy and way, way below zero. Through miscalculation, I had ended up being dropped near the Cross-Bronx Expressway. I walked up a ramp to the elevated carriageway and began trying to thumb another lift. Utterly stupid: no car was likely to stop. But I was tired, and getting desperate.

After about an hour the intense cold was biting deep into the bone. Though I had gloves, I lost feeling in my hands. Still I persisted, exhausted but adamant, fatigue wrecking common sense.

Then came something I’d never experienced. Calm was creeping over me, and a kind of passivity. My sense of danger ebbed. ‘Why not just step back to the steel barrier,’ I thought, ‘and rest a while?’ I did this.