I almost fell off my seat. The shock came from reading a newspaper article about one British and one French submarine crashing into each other in the Atlantic Ocean. Luckily, the nuclear bombs they were carrying didn't go off.

Had they exploded, there was a good chance they would have triggered a war which would have destroyed the world. Which would have put a dent in my plans for a weekend of major vegging-out.

"Even cars have collision detectors," I mused out loud. "So how can submarines collide in a space as big as an ocean?"

My mentor/ bartender paused in his glass-polishing to share my puzzlement. "It does seem odd," he agreed. "Especially since the Atlantic Ocean is 82 million square kilometers in size."

I blinked. Eighty-two million square kilometers! That's bigger than my apartment. It's bigger than my boss's desk. It's bigger than Russia and Canada and China and the US put together. It's bigger than my ego, possibly.

Imagine the whole of Asia cleared of buildings and turned into a massive flat plain. (I believe several property developers are actually planning to do this.) Put two tricycles on it, one in Siberia, and the other in south India, and tell them to ride around at random. Now imagine the two trikes colliding. Bump! "Oops, sorry, didn't see you there."

Only it's even more unlikely than that, since plains are flat, while oceans are four kilometers deep. So it's like the only two flying tricycles in the world bumping into each other.

It's rare to see my mentor/bartender flummoxed, so I decided to track down some answers.

There are more than a dozen submarine drivers (pilots? skippers? admirals?) living in Asia, so it didn't take me long to find one. He was a surprisingly short British gentleman who didn't wish to give his full name, but said I could refer to him as Lieutenant Commander S (Ret'd) of the British Royal Navy. He'd read the same article.

"Interestingly, the French surfaced immediately and went back to France for lunch, thus rendering their secret nuclear deterrence a little redundant," he said. "The Atlantic is a very big pond and it was exceptionally unlucky for the boats to be in the same space of water. There again, one-in-a-million shots seem to come up nine times out of ten."

His words reminded me that one often comes across coincidences at sea. Anyone remember "Futility" by Morgan Robertson? It was a 1898 novel in which a state-of-the-art ocean liner on its way to New York hits an iceberg on a calm April night. Many die because of a shortage of lifeboats. In the book, the ship is called The Titan. Yes, it's the story of the Titanic, minus Kate and Leonardo.

Incidentally, Morgan later wrote a book about a war which starts with a Japanese sneak attack in Hawaii. I'm hoping that one day a third novel by him is discovered, about a non-entity working on newspapers in Asia who becomes incredibly rich.

In the meantime, there's a second-hand Mercedes with a collision detector in the car lot near my house. If the British or French navies would like it, just give me a call. I'll get you a good price.

The writer is a columnist and journalist.

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