Driven Mad

While Jeremy Clarkson's recent ill health means he continues to recuperate at his luxury Black Sea dacha in the Crimea, where the Central Committee of the BBC has kindly provided him with qualified use of a top-of-the-range Moskvich 1500SL plus chauffeuse (see photo), Derek Seeds​ has started a valuable debate - well actually a series of foul-mouthed rants - on Facebook about the state of modern driving in Britain to which I have felt both compelled, and indeed privileged, to contribute.

Subjects have already included lane discipline on motorways, drivers who don't put their lights on in dense fog and my own tentative contribution about the many mentally asymmetric drivers who indicate wrongly, when at all, on roundabouts. Readers able to override parental controls will already be familiar with both my and Derek's less than poetic paeans to tailgaters. Please, please do also send in more examples of bad driving that you have witnessed or experienced, whether or not you survived them.

However, as a number of Canadians also report similar deviations over there, and they are a very long way away (a simple fact wherever on Earth you live, so this clearly involves us all), it's clearly time to widen the debate; that is, to discover whether this is an Anglo-Saxon problem or just, as usual, Europe's fault. So I'm also calling all foreigners - by which I mean those few who UKIP concede don't already live in Britain - to contribute your thoughts about the state of driving where you are. Do you too have problems? If so, are they like ours or different? Can you also blame them, without censure, on eastern European benefits cheats and health tourists? 

Readers are of course advised to brief themselves on the burning issues already raised by referring to Derek's and my Facebook pages. But here, to give you a flavour of the quality of the debate so far, is another habit that's become very popular within the dickhead community and is - quite literally - driving me mad. Mad, I say.

It's the one where there's a part-filter lane at traffic lights. On green you can go straight ahead, turn right if traffic allows, or wait for the filter arrow light if it doesn't. There's a junction near me where I need to go straight ahead to get home, the left lane is always chokker and there's always heavy oncoming traffic. Good sense says that if the car ahead in the filter lane doesn't signal right I should follow it, but if it signals then I should keep left to avoid possible delay.

Now I've been counting, and nine out of ten cars these days go into the right lane, stop at the lights without signalling, wait for the forward green light and ONLY THEN signal, meaning that the poor deluded fools who trusted that their fellow motorists know what they are doing either have to wait or incur the road rage of drivers in the left lane who think they're just trying to push in.

DEATH - however lingering, however many innocent family members and relatives are herded into the net of retribution, tied to a post against a wall and shot: first the knees, then, after a couple of days to think about it, the rest of them - IS TOO GOOD FOR THESE PEOPLE.

You know, that kind of thing.