IT is of increasing wonder to me that I have managed to go thus far through my existence without seeing a dead body in real life (or should that be real death).

This helped to make the experience I had last Friday night all the more disturbing. It was a February 29 to remember, if ever there was one.

We had been to Bristol - five of us, in a car, with my brother driving, and me in the front passenger seat - and we were almost home.

We left the motorway at Junction 16, passed the Hilton Hotel and had just negotiated the next roundabout, still on Great Western Way, heading for town on the dual carriageway.

Then we noticed it. On the left-hand verge, about eight feet from the road, was a body.

Now, when you see somebody on the ground at 11. 30pm on a Friday night, your first instinct might be that they've had a skinful. But this was different.

There was nobody else around, there wasn't an obvious place that he had come from, and he was motionless.

Worst of all, he was lying exactly as you would expect a corpse to be, with arms stretched out and his leg twisted at a funny angle.

It looked very bad, and the cold draught of blood that went through our veins told us all that we had made a gruesome discovery.

Thoughts ranged from the probability that he had been struck by a passing vehicle to the possibility that he had been dumped there.

We stopped the car about 100 metres down the carriageway and briefly considered reversing back, but there were all kinds of dangers involved, so we dialled 999.

A thought in the back of my mind told me the first thing the police would need to establish was that we hadn't killed him.

Hearts and adrenalin pumped. Then relief.

I looked back to see a shadowy figure, stumbling towards us, with its arms out wide and its legs all over the place, walking like a zombie who had just come back to life. To us, that is exactly what he was.

But it was now obvious that our dead man was a drunk after all - and he was what can only be described as perfectly drunk, barely conscious.

But our fears weren't over.

Now he started running towards our car, leaving us no option but to speed off, with the zombie in pursuit and now dangerously veering all over the road, unsure of whether he was on Great Western Way or the Milky Way.

He was later seen hitch-hiking along the road, with only the mud on his coat making him visible in his dark clothes.

In more ways than one, it had been a near-death experience - and a reminder that some people are bent on living much nearer to it than others.

1:55pm Thursday 3rd April 2008

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