AND FINALLY

In a dizzying marriage of high-speed car culture and ancient nature worship, motorway bosses in Austria have secretly hired a full-time team of druids to improve road safety at accident blackspots.

Keen to Getafix for their safety issues, Austria’s motorway authority hired the druids to drain the area’s ‘negative energy’ and restore the spiritual peace of the pristine tarmac slicing its way through the countryside.

And what’s more all the paganeering seemed to deliver high performance: in one spot the fatal accident rate fell from an average of six a year to zero. The trials were so impressive officials have announced plans to roll the scheme out nationwide.

The team of green cross mystics apparently search out negative radiation with dowsing rods and restore the area’s “terrestrial radiation”. Reports of  ritualistic sacrifices of Ford Mondeos on the hard shoulder are unconfirmed.

For their part the Druids are now calling for fellow pagans to “clunk click” on every magic-potion fuelled trip.