Some years ago, I bought a kayak. A friend and I secured it onto the roof rack of my little car. Along the M5, the kayak together with the roof rack liberated themselves from their constraints but, still bound together, took off from the roof of the car and flew down the motorway.
The combined kayak-roof-rack flotsam narrowly missed a people carrier full of children but hit a BMW. Within moments, its tyres ran along the bottom of the kayak from bow to stern, damaging both kayak and car in the process. Luckily, no-one was hurt, and the drivers of both vehicles were remarkably good humoured about the great kayak getaway.
At this point, readers might question my use of the word “secured” and conclude that we had actually secured the kayak to the car. One can reasonably conclude that, as people can and do transport kayaks every day, we had missed something critical out of the process. We had. We had
