Diabetic Driver Discrimination

As I have noted on this blog before, I suffer from Type 1 Diabetes.  I developed this in 1988 but have only been considered disabled since 2005 when the law was altered to encompass more ‘hidden disabilities’.  This did not prevent my previous employer from breaking the law, despite the awards it had received for supporting disabled staff, and allowing my manager to bully me on the basis of my health condition, one which I will never be cured of.  Generally I had thought that British society was becoming more understanding of diabetes, especially with the continuing rise in people with Type 2 Diabetes.  However, the government seems to be going in the opposite direction.  In part I imagine that stems from them wanting to cut back what is seen as support for anyone who is disabled.  They have inherited a distilled version of the Victorio-Thatcherite ‘deserving poor’ perception and blended in elements of Nazism (or perhaps simply Winston Churchill’s eugenic attitudes) that see the lives of the disabled as being less than those of ‘normal’ people.  Not only do we need to do without assistance we need to be reminded that we are not as good as these others, though as we age, even Conservative MPs develop one impairment or another which moves them into this category.  I guess wealth buys you an exemption.

 

Since 1988 having Diabetes has meant that I have had to renew my driving licence every three years.  My parents who are now both 75 have to do the same.  There is clearly an assumption that the authorities have to check in with you at regular intervals to make sure you have not become a hazard sometime in the past 35 months.  I find this ironic given how much dangerous driving and horrific accidents I see on a daily basis driving into London or even back and forth across South-West England, presumably committed by the ‘normal’ drivers.  However, a minister, one I have not been able to track down, apparently outlined in parliament by Philip Hammond, Secretary of State for Transport in 2011 how hazardous diabetic drivers are.  I have not seen the figures, but he felt the need to clamp down on these dangerous handlers of vehicles, even more sinister because their disability is hidden and not seen for all to see.  Perhaps I should wear some kind of triangle on my clothing so people know I am a diabetic, white seems to be the common colour for diabetic products or perhaps a nice clinical blue would be better.

 

As a result of this clamp down, not only do I have to complete the form I always had to and send it back to the DVLA outlining how even though it is difficult to register with a GP especially when you have moved around as much as I have in recent months, four towns in nine months, I have attended not only my GP to see about my diabetes but a consultant too.  Added to this, every time I drive I must check my blood sugar level 30 minutes before I get in the car and then every 2 hours while driving.  As you can see this begins to impinge on my life.  There is no ability to jump in the car to get some milk if we find we have none; I must wake a certain time before driving to make sure all the checks are done; I cannot rush someone to hospital in my car unless I have delayed thirty minutes, though that is something easily done waiting to get an ambulance.  Yet all around me are drivers dropping off at the wheel; drivers whose own blood sugar is so low (because, yes, that does happen to non-diabetics too especially during the evening rush hour) they cannot concentrate and drivers who are so offended by imagined slights that they dissolve into an instant fury which is more dangerous to other drivers than a hypoglycemic attack for which diabetics feel the onset and can be tackling safely before it develops.  In fact contrary to what ill-informed ministers seem to believe, when I drive my blood sugar actually rises leading very slowly to hyperglycemia rather than hypo, but I guess that ministers stop bothering once they have got passed the ‘p’.

 

As a result of this new approach if I am shunted in a traffic queue and the police are involved, I can be taken into custody even if it was not my fault that the accident happened.  The driver who hit me, even if he fell asleep at the wheel or went into a rage, is allowed to go home.  I have to bring my blood checker and prove all my blood levels for the journey and undergo other blood tests.  Thus, a diabetic, unlike ‘normal’ drivers is assumed to be at least partially guilty, even before there is any proof against him/her.  The consultant I used to visit in West London last year was convinced that soon all his patients would lose their driving licence.  Despite me stating that I had been driving with diabetes for 25 years without an incident, he told me it was inevitable that I would be banned and recounted a man who had had two lower blood sugar readings when sleeping at home, not whilst driving and this leading to him losing his licence.  This attitude discourages diabetics from checking their blood sugar levels for the fear of having a ‘bad’ reading somewhere on their checking device, something apparently the police can demand to see without a warrant despite it containing personal data.  With the numbers of people in the UK with diabetes rising, a whole sector runs the risk of having our lives wrecked by other people’s simply uncaring driving.

 

The new policy is based simply on ill-informed prejudice.  Where are all the statistics about the thousands of injuries and deaths caused by diabetic drivers?  Why is it that someone who keeps a close check on what their body is doing is discriminated against when someone ‘normal’ still hung over from the night before or still partially stoned has no such checks against them?  They do not have to check their blood and be able to show the police on demand what level their alcohol or drug level is at even when they are not responsible for the crash.  I do recognise that anyone involved in a traffic accident, even bystanders who have come to assist can now have their blood alcohol levels checked: another clever policy from the government which discourages people from helping out at incidents for fear of being sucked in themselves.

 

I do wonder what step the government will take next.  Will asthmatics have to blow into a bag, video themselves on their phone and email it to the police in each constabulary as they drive through?  Will people who suffer migraines have to whack their head against a government-issue brick to show they are not suffering a migraine before they drive?  Will people with eczema have to carry a diagram of the areas of skin they have lubricated before getting in the car in case some skin flakes fall over the steering wheel so distressing a ‘normal’ person as they speed past?  The policy does nothing to aid road safety, it is simply a policy which taps into the paranoia that is such a vote winner in the UK.  The consequences for the ordinary, yes normal people who happen to have diabetes, caught up by this system can be a wrecked life forced to travel on prohibitively expensive public transport and unable to hold certain jobs making them more likely to be unemployed and dependent on the government.  However, is it any surprise that we see irrational regulations coming from the clueless government of today?

Dangerous New 'Games' On The Road

Back in a job, I am driving daily once more, not the hundreds of kilometres I used to do in a week, just 140 Km these days.  However, this does take me around the M25 and into West London, so does expose me to quite a lot of traffic.  In the past:  http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2010/11/new-bad-driving-habits.html  and http://rooksmoor.blogspot.co.uk/2010/01/extreme-weather-extreme-behaviour.html   I have noted trends in bad driving that seem to suddenly appear.  Some such as driving with headlights on full beam or using fog lights at all times of day and night except when there is actually any fog, seem to be continuing with us for now.  Tailgating is as popular as ever as is undertaking and slaloming between the lanes of vehicles.  However, ahead of this Christmas season two new bad driving trends have appeared that you might like to keep an eye open for.

One of them was actually suggested in the media a couple of years back when petrol prices rose sharply.  This is the impression that if you drive with your wheels on the white lines you can reduce your fuel consumption because of the reduced friction between your tyre and the road.  Back then I saw a few people try it, and now it is back in fashion, certainly through the areas I drive.  The only problem is the white lines people seem to be favouring are those running down the middle of the road.  I have had to move over hard towards the pavement as cars charge towards me not really straddling the line but certainly with their right-hand set of wheels (given that we drive on the left-hand side of the road in the UK) riding on the white line.  On many roads in London and the Home Counties, with the size of many ‘family’ cars these days, squeezing down the narrow streets, passed rows of parked cars is a challenge, but this is increased if certain drivers intend to dominate the central line.  Of course the ‘law’ of British roads is that larger, more powerful and newer cars always have right of way, anyone in a smaller or older car must give way, no matter what the actual laws, or face a stream of abuse or even being followed until you reach a convenient location where the other driver can get out and either assault your car or you.  I imagine that the amount of fuel saved by driving this way is compensated for by how much such drivers rev up and accelerate away from junctions anyway.

The other habit which certainly seems to be a ‘game’ of some kind or about asserting the size of a driver’s ego over that of people around him/her (and such habits are not confined to men) happens at traffic lights.  What happens is when the lights turn to green, the driver at the front starts off but only moves so far that half of their car is over the stop line.  They then wait until the lights go to amber (in the UK a single amber light precedes the lights turning red) and then accelerate away, meaning that all the cars behind them are compelled to wait at the red for the cycle to go through once more.  I do not really see the purpose of this, I guess the driver pulling away can drive around any lane they choose, as this often occurs, in my experience at traffic lights on roundabouts.  Given how people like to cut across or block people moving to the correct lane, I can imagine this is something desirable.  However, blocking a whole batch of vehicles from proceeding, further congests what in and around London, is already very dense traffic.  The first few times I saw this happen I had assumed that the driver had stalled, though the cars that this happens with are new models and generally powerful or that the driver was on their mobile phone (drivers holding mobile phones in their hands while driving is still incredibly common in the areas I drive through) and was not ready to drive on.  However, it has now happened to me so often in the same way that I can only assume it is deliberate.

One habit which I had forgotten, but seems to be back in a new form, is having a car come hard up behind you, overtake you just to sit one vehicle space in front of you, continuing at the same speed as you.  I know I have an old car, but I do find it incredible that viewing it is so offensive to drivers they have to go around me.  To this, on motorways has been added a new twist.  A slip road appears on the left for you to leave the motorway.  The driver behind me wants to go down that road.  However, rather than indicating to go into that lane, first he overtakes me going into the middle or the fast lane, depending on the layout of the junction, then he cuts diagonally across three lanes just in front of me to go off down the slip road.  This causes me naturally to brake and the cars further back to do so as well.  I do not understand the motives for this behaviour and can only guess that the driver is upset that I have paid insufficient attention to his greatness and it alerting me to what I will be missing now that he is leaving the motorway.

All of these behaviours stem from the fact that UK drivers clearly see driving as an activity in which their dignity is constantly being defended.  They have to assert their right to be first and noticed at every chance.  It is like preening to scare off rival creatures.  It stems from a clear sense of insecurity, that even to have a single car, especially a slower or older one is offensive.  A sense of lanes is ignored and the driver feels he or she can simply ride across them in any sequence that makes his or her journey apparently easiest or more exciting.  The indignation at anyone who does anything which whether intentional or not, disrupts such desires is instant, withering, bullying and sometimes violent.  In such circumstances, with most speed cameras switched off and traffic police numbers continuing to fall in the current austerity measures, it is no wonder that accidents are climbing in number and that daily driving is becoming still more of an unsettling activity.

Pay & Display Dismay

One section of the UK population which irritates me immensely, as anyone who reads this blog knows, are those people who believe in a 'freer' Britain in which they can speed around , use their mobile phones and park where they like with impunity.  This is primarily associated with driving, whether in a car or a commercial van or lorry, but in fact this is simply because they feel they can talk about outrageous things in that sphere whereas in others such as re-introducing the death penalty and castration as sentences for courts and expelling any immigrants, would be challenged more vigorously.  In the field of regulation of driving and parking they constantly portray the rules as having nothing to do with safety but simply as a form of taxation.  I constantly come back to the fact that if you do not break the law, then this is a tax you are exempt from.  However, it is clear these people think very individualist behaviour in vehicles, which puts others' health and lives at risk is not a crime so they should face no charges.

Another issue has come up in this regard, brought into view by the Breakfast programme run on BBC1.  This is the rule that even if someone has a valid ticket to park in a particular location, if there are numerous other ones on display, they can still be fined.  The response has been vigorous, that this is another tax.  I am marginally more sympathetic to this argument because if these people have actually got to a car park, rather than believing they have some exceptional God-given right to park on a double yellow line with their lights flashing while they do the shopping, as I see so often, then that is a good step.  However, if your car, van or lorry is full of different, similarly looking tickets, why should you compel a parking warden to read them all to find if one is correct or not.  They complain about traffic wardens anyway, so why are they happy to give them more work.  Perhaps councils and the government should adopt the same approach and never bother taking down road signs when the road layout is changed.  Perhaps they should simply stick up signs that they have lying around rather than ones that actually relate to the towns that can be reached from the location where the sign is.  Maybe we should put up a selection of speed limit signs and say that drivers have to comply with whichever one is correct for the particular road.  This would be a major challenge for many drivers given that many cannot adhere to the speed limit even when there is a single clear sign.

I think, that if you cannot be bothered to keep your vehicle sufficiently tidy so that anyone can see simply whether you have the correct ticket or not, then you deserve to be fined.  The UK is better than some countries anyway.  I remember in France in the 1980s seeing people with a string of road tax stickers down their windscreen, but no-one in the UK would complain that we have to show only the current one on our windscreens.  Potentially I could have thirteen different road tax discs on my windscreen making it a challenge for anyone to spot if I had a current one, but, of course, that is seen as a silly approach.  Simply chuck away old parking permits.  Or, if that is really too much trouble, at least shove them off the dashboard on to the floor!

What this whole complaint stems from is the unhealthy characteristic that seems to have taken root in the UK and is growing like mold throughout our society.  This believes that the individual's desires (not even just their needs) must be satisfied and not constrained, certainly not by the safety or interests of anyone else, and certainly not policed by any state authority (just by who can shout loudest).  This is already impinging on road safety but is likely to spread into other aspects of society effectively implementing 'mob rule' in many things.  Examples of this spread can be seen in Simon Cowell's desire to have a political show that makes decisions by people telephoning in.  Of course, tabloid newspapers have long done this, I remember an opinion poll in 'The Sun' newspaper of the 1980s which told you to ring one number if you wanted the minimum sentence for certain crimes set at 20 years and another if you wanted it at 25 years.  There was no option for no sentence or 10 years or 15 years.  What can be seen as a 'free' choice can easily be engineered to channel you into backing a policy which has already been established (just ask any of the dictators who have run 'free' elections) and so seemingly giving it popular support.  Of course, the people peddling this kind of approach see what they do as simply based on 'common sense' whereas in fact it is based on assumptions and prejudices and excludes so many options that fall outside the very individualist approach they advocate. 

If you want to see this in action just watch an episode of 'Live from Studio Five' which is made by SkyNews (owned by Rupert Murdoch) and shown on Channel 5, Monday to Friday evenings.  It features former model Melinda Messenger, former footballer Ian Wright and a runner-up on 'The Apprentice' television show.  It is a magazine programme which mixes coverage of celebrities with discussion of news items.  This is where it is most dangerous as it presents a very right-wing perspective especially on social and legal issues in a light manner with the presenters indicating that they see pretty extreme views as somehow 'common sense'.  Fortunately it only attracts 230,000 viewers.  However, it is a good example of how the 'me first above anyone else' attitude is being fed into the popular consciousness and it is on this basis of assumptions about 'common sense' that more extreme steps are made to seem unassailable by those of us who would like an inclusive society that does not value freedom to behave how you like over the right of people to live in safety.

Extreme Weather; Extreme Behaviour

As many commentators have noted during the recent snowy and icy weather, the trouble in the UK is not that we experience extremes of weather, and in fact what we have seen is considered normal in many neighbouring states (remember London is as far North as Moscow), but that we do not experience them often enough.  For comparisons we have to look back to 1981, 1963, 1947 and beyond rather than, say, 2006 or even 2001 which other countries could draw comparisons with.  This applies to all 'extremes' of weather in the UK.  The hot summer of 1995 could only be compared to 1976, 19 years earlier.  The bulk of the weather in Britain is tepid and this allows us all to forget how to cope when it gets a little colder, hotter, wetter or drier than has been the case in the past decade.  Combined with this is the tightness of public funding especially at a local level as councils have been facing constraints really non-stop since the mid-1970s when 'cuts' first became a common phrase for British local authorities.  So, given that you are likely to only have harsh weather in winter one year in twenty or thirty, it is clear that it is a gamble they are willing to take to save a little money in not buying salt or grit and keeping it in storage and the necessary lorries maintained. 

The other factor is the privatisation of so many public services in the UK. Why would a train company risk being sued by stranded customers or penalised for a string of late arrivals by trying to run a comprehensive train service.  In a hot summer, it is far easier for water companies to declare restrictions on the use of water and to reduce the water pressure than for them to spend money to repairing the high level of leakages in the British system which means around 25% of British water is lost compared to 14% of French and 10% of Dutch.  Greed and penny pinching make it far harder for the UK to be adaptable when something slightly different occurs.  Of course, we have just finished one six-year war and are still in the middle of one that has now be raging for coming up to its ninth year (almost as long as the First and Second World Wars combined) so costing millions of pounds in resources and a constant haemorrage of British people through death and injury.

Anyway, given the context that the weather and the response of the local authorities, who I acknowledge do the best they can with the resources they have, creates, how do the British people respond to it?  Well, this goes to 'extremes' as well.  People talk of the 'Blitz spirit' or the 'Dunkirk mentality', once again having to rely on nostalgia for a war that ended 64 years ago (in fact going back 69-70 years to those specific events) rather than finding anything of merit from the British public in those intervening years.  It is fascinating how with a single snowfall British people suddenly start talking to each other.  I know the weather is a common topic of conversation but it seems that it needs to really begin disrupting people's lives before they break through to talking to their neighbours let alone strangers.  Even among colleagues I have seen a change.  Those stranded at home yesterday did not sit in front of their radiators whining they were out checking on elderly people, fetching food and helping people dig out their cars.  In some ways the British cannot be stirred from their apathy unless it is by a 'crisis'.  It has to be a tangible crisis, as the failure to alarm us all about terrorists in the early 2000s showed, something which is intangible will not stir us, it has to be immediately visible and physical and so snow and floods in particular flick the switch in the average Briton's head.  Ironically, it seems, in my experience, and I accept that is very limited, to even push aside the usual whining about immigrants, dole 'scroungers' and so on and emphasise for many people the commonality of humanity. 

A new focus of complaint, however, are those who warm us about global warming.  There is a saying 'one swallow does not make a summer' and the same can be said in this case 'one snowfall does not mean there is no global warming'.  The climate does shift steadily, we know the 11th century was warm enough for people to farm on Greenland and the 17th century cold enough for people to have bonfires on the River Thames but within those periods there were hot or cold, dry or wet seasons.  As a spokesman for the Met(reological) Office noted on BBC1 yesterday, even if in 20 years when the global temperature is 2-3oC warmer we will still get snowy winters.

This beneficial, communal spirit which gets turned on by 'extreme' weather does have a counteracting behaviour too, sometimes among the very same people.  Britons are, on the whole, very selfish and often find it difficult to comprehend that anyone else may have equal and/or different needs that have any validity let alone greater validity than their own perceived needs.  This is most apparent when British people drive.  The bulk of British drivers want no-one else to be on the road and if there are other drivers, for them to get out of the way.  They see themselves as driving in a bubble, looking only a short distance ahead rather than what they are in fact, a cog in a complex machine of traffic.  This situation has worsened and drivers now often do not feel obliged to signal, they complain at attempts to make them stick to a speed limit, and in my experience, these days occasionally feel it is appropriate to drive on pavements if it can get them where they 'need' to be, that little bit quicker.  They take no responsibility for their actions, always blaming the others, especially if those others are cyclists or pedestrians. 

Rather than tempering this behaviour the snow has apparently exacerbated it.  Partly, I think, it is accentuated by the fact that 4x4 drivers, who assume they should be granted a superior position on the road at normal times, actually have it in such slippery conditions so apparently legitimising their arrogant attitudes and the fact that they are driving so far removed from the road.  Ironically, talking to a man this week who lives in rural Devon, he said that now the 4x4 drivers have conditions which suit their vehicles many drivers are too afraid and lack the expertise to use them properly and so end up blocking village high streets.  Despite the conditions many drivers are going too fast and are impatient with people trying to get over icy patches or going up and down hills cautiously.  In my office we discussed how one car was tipped on its side on a road.  Even stunt men find this a challenge, it is not the result simply of ice and snow unless the vehicle has slid sideways off a particular camber, it is achieved by driving too fast.  Too many people in the UK speed in normal conditions and apparently have no appreciation of the stopping distances needed even on dry roads let alone on icy ones.  Speeding among too many people, including, it seems newspapers like the 'Daily Mail' (complaining this week about the £15 increase in speeding fines to pay compensation to victims of other crimes, seemingly forgetting that speeding is a crime and that people who speed are criminals), is not seen as a criminal offence, rather it is perceived as a right, one that even outweighs commons sense.

The occasions on which such behaviour becomes insane is in the attacks on workers driving snow ploughs and gritting lorries.  Interviews last night with such drivers showed that they had had objects thrown at their vehicles on some occasions smashing the windscreens.  Apparently this stems from frustration that the roads have not been sufficiently cleared or not soon enough or that side roads are neglected or routes in rural areas cannot be kept open constantly.  Attacks on the gritting vehicles is like shooting yourself in the foot because you are tired from walking.  Yet, to too many people it apparently seems rational behaviour.  However, perhaps it is unsurprising in a country where ambulance and fire fighting crews are attacked when carrying out their duties.  If you have a problem with the services protest to the people who actually control it, vote for someone who will adopt a different policy, do not attack the people trying to deliver a life saving service, doing an ordinary job like the rest of us, under tough and dangerous circumstances anyway.  Think about it, someone who drives a gritting lorry has to get up early on the coldest days of the year and drive constantly in the most hazardous conditions.  Less severe, but equally moronic is the people who rush to overtake gritting lorries and snow ploughs.  Think about it.  If the road did not need a plough or gritting, the lorry would not be there and before a lorry has passed over a particular section the road is likely to be even more dangerous than usual, and you want to hurry on to that untreated road surface?

The other unhelpful thing is the attitude of employers who are given privileged opportunities to whine about how much the weather is damaging the economy.  It is the same whenever there is a bank holiday, they are allowed to come on to radio and television and produce some huge figure about how badly industry is missing out by people being off for a day or two (in the case of bank holidays, of course, the UK has five fewer than the next nearest number in the EU and many of our competitors have many more than us.  I imagine only the fact that the additional 2012 bank holiday is linked to the Queen's diamond jubilee that has meant no complaints from business leaders about it).  Apparently the snow is losing business £600 million per day.  Of course fuel utility companies and even many supermarkets (given the British tendency to stockpile food at any hint of a crisis) are actually benefiting from the cold weather.  The new twist is the complaint from employers that too many schools have closed too quickly and so compelling parents to take time off to look after their children. 

What the employers forget (or choose not to notice) is that often teachers cannot afford to live anywhere near the schools they work at because house prices have risen far faster than teachers' salaries over the past forty years and schools are fearful of being sued if any child has an accident even in good weather so are terrified they will get a slew of litigation if children slip over in the snow.  Added to this, much investment in school buildings and heating facilities has been neglected over the past thirty years, there are regular reports on the poor conditions many schools actually are in, so it is unsurprising when their aged boilers pack up or single-glazed classrooms are too cold to study in.  None of these considerations is allowed to get in the way of employers yet again telling us we are lazy and negligent and so are costing the country money (though of course not reducing their salaries or bonuses a jot).  Hassle from employers makes many people feel they must get on the road to reach their work, often adding the hazards and accidents.

Extreme weather shows how shabby the UK's infrastructure has become from decades of cuts and when this is combined with an unassailable belief that satisfaction of all individual wishes is the only legitimate concern, it creates 'crisis' that neighbouring states must look upon with bemusement/amusement. I wonder what happens in places like western Normandy and Brittany which, like the UK, benefit from the Atlantic warm currents that stop the climate being as cold, most winters, as, say, northern France, the Benelux countries and Germany.  In these regions of France they must have mild winters but the occasional harsh ones too, yet I never hear Cherbourg or Rennes or Brest grinding to a halt when this occurs.  I suspect it means keeping things in store that you might only use once per decade, but at least you know they are there.  I guess to it stems from an attitude which is not all 'me, me, me' when harsh conditions bite.  I may be wrong and would be interested to hear from people who have had experiences in these regions.  I have certainly travelled around Belgium in the winter when the temperature is often -10oC or worse without difficulty and without the madness that seems to affect too many Britons whenever snow comes.  The weather might be extreme for the UK but let us hope that negative extreme behaviour can be moderated and the positive behaviour become normalised rather than needing extreme weather to trigger it.

P.P. 12/01/2010: One contributory factor to schools closing that I had missed, but is now being reported widely, are the league table ratings around percentage of attendance.  This means that if a school opens and say, even a third or a quarter, in fact anything more than about a tenth, of its pupils cannot get in then it slides quickly in terms of its standing for attendance.  I should have remembered the messages that I have seen coming home from the school that the 8-year old who lives in my house attend.  The headteachers writes of figures like 92.4% attendance and a drive to get this figure higher.  It is unsurprising then, that heads shut the school and so have that day null-and-void for the statistics rather than risk dropping even a 1-2% and so looking worse than last year when we had a mild winter.

Another point of behaviour that I forgot to mention is drivers using their fog lights when visibility is good.  Many drivers, even now where there is a lot of thawing going on, certainly in the counties I have been driving through, seem to assume these lights are simply 'bad weather' lights.  They forget that on frosty days often the air is far clearer than even on rainy days and so there is no need for fog lights.  You can be fined if you have them on when visibility is more than 50-100 metres.  On the back fog lights can be up to 30 times more powerful than normal rear lights.  I know when you are driving up and down valleys on foggy days you go in and out of fog and may be excused for leaving them on in clear patches, but some people switch them on just when it is cold and frosty, every one car in ten I passed this morning had them on and there was not a scrap of fog on the 190Km I covered.  I do wonder, if, as with drivers who keep full beam on at all times, whether these drivers actually know how to operate the functions on their cars or get stuck with a certain setting.

'Rubbernecking': Far Less Common than People Think

As regular readers of this blog will know I drive anything between 280 Km and 630 Km per week, so spend quite a lot of time on the road. I imagine that this means I see a lot more bad driving than most people. Of course 'bad' is a subjective description, lorry drivers view anyone else being in their vicinity as being bad even if we are obeying the law precisely. Daily I see congestion and accidents, the kind of things that fill the traffic reports of radio stations from national right down to small local level stations. Often when there is an accident on one side of, say the M25 or M3 or even the A31 (a dual carriageway which has a wide, overgrown central reservation) then you find traffic on the other side, i.e. the side without the actual accident, slows down as well.

On some radio stations there are sneery comments condemning the 'rubberneckers', people supposedly in some morbid fascination, to stare at the accident. This misapprehension is heard on many radio stations, though ones like Wave 105 which covers Hampshire and Dorset, counties I often drive through, are the worst. Wave 105 is a bad radio station anyway with incredibly self-righteous DJs clearly aware of their populist, rather bigoted audience who seem to just love complaining about immigrant and generally being smug about the'right' way to do things, so perhaps it is unsurprising that they sneer at those drivers they believe are behaving in an improper way.

Today, from my extensive experience, I am going to outline why I believe this reports are based on a misapprehension about most drivers. I am not pretending that there are not people who do not slow down to stare at accidents, possibly with genuine concern if on a small road, that it might be a friend or neighbour who has crashed. However, in any situation these people are in a small minority. People slow down on the opposite carriage for one simple reason, it is a natural reaction. When you are next a passenger in a car, taxi or coach, notice what the driver does when they see a flashing light, even from the corner of their eye. Their foot lifts from the accelerator automatically. If you asked them they probably could not even tell you that they had done it.

Another thing is that many roads curve in the UK, even motorways, so as you approach an incident, it is not always clear whether the flashing lights are on your side of the carriageway or on the other side until you are up close, especially as usually there are lots of slow-moving cars and lorries in between you and the incident when you first become aware of it. In addition, there are in fact, quite often, accidents that go across both carriageways. You do not know until you are right up to it, what is happening, so naturally you slow up long before you could even catch a glimpse of the accident site. It is good that drivers slow when they see flashing lights, this is something we want to encourage, not sneer at.

It does not even have to be a flashing light. I drive a lot on the M3 and M25 and often on the so-called matrix boards information flashes up about congestion or accidents on other roads, often far distant from where you are at the moment. On the M3 you get information about the M4 which is reached from the M3 down the A34 or the M25, but you are still warned about incidents on it. Around the M25 which connects all the major roads and motorways you get information about roads which are often on the other side of London from where you are currently driving. However, again you will notice, that no matter what information is being displayed, naturally people slow up so that they can read it. Sometimes the instruction is immediate such as a speed limit or something like the currently very popular message 'Queue Caution 40'. It takes some seconds to process the data even if it is not urgent. You now get information like 'A34 38 miles 34 minutes', which is useful if you are going up the A34, but even if you are not, the bulk of drivers read, process and probably start analysing what it means in terms of speed. Again, this leads them to slow up. Anyone who drives on Britain's motorways will know that the moment a indication like this comes into sight traffic automatically slows. It could say 'God save the Queen' or 'Qwertyuiop' and it would still have the same effect.

Slowing up when you come up to an accident whatever side of the road it is on, is not the bad thing that radio stations lazily assume it to be. Of course there are people who do not slow up and that is why you get accidents opposite existing accidents and through complex road works (which seem to be all over the motorways of South-East England at present). However, it is they who should be condemned. Slowing traffic in the opposite carriageway to an accident is a natural response: blue lights/matrix signs = slowing up. The equation is no more complex than that, and for anything else to happen is both unnatural and in fact hazardous. So, let us stop complaining about the supposed morbid 'rubberneckers' and actually take account of what really happens on our roads, which in my view, is actually the more sensible reaction from drivers.

Mind Out! That Child Might Be Wearing An Ipod

When I was growing up there used to be a sign on the back of ice cream vans with a hand held up saying 'Mind Out! That Child May Be Deaf'. The implication was for speeding motorists that a child coming away from an ice cream van might not hear their engine and so be hit by them. In fact I do not think the child needed to be deaf to be put into this kind of risk. Generally too many people speed in residential areas and also children who have just got a treat are usually so focused on it that a meteorite could be crashing on to their school and they would not notice. There was a very good radio advertisement a couple of years back which outlined this principle. It played the sounds heard by a young child, an elderly person and then a teenager approaching a road. Of course those who you might think most at risk, the child and senior citizen were aware of the traffic, the teenager on their mobile phone walked right into it. This is why, if I could have found the basis for it I would have done one warning about the use of ipods and other MP3 players.

I know this problem has been around ever since they invented the personal stereo, as far back as the Walkman in 1980. People being cut off from the outside world (though often the people around them were very aware of what they were listening to) was a problem then. However, I think the reason why it has got worse is because the ear pieces now disappear entirely into the ear (rather than sit on the outside bedded on a piece of foam) and also that the person's sight is also occupied. With an ipod the user constantly seems to be tweaking with the settings or reading the tiny text on the screen and if they actually put their ipod away they pick up their mobile phone and start texting someone or flicking through photos on it. What you end up with is someone who is in a bubble in which their two main senses: sight and hearing are detached from everything around them. They are more cut off, I believe, than a deaf or blind person ever was.

I have encountered personal problems with this. My mother is going deaf, which is unsurprising, given that she is 70, but she has hearing aids and we make sure we speak slowly and clearly and look at her when we speak. For herself she takes care when she is out and about, knowing that she might get caught out by something approaching out of her line of sight that these days she might not hear. So, there is a working relationship between the (partially) deaf person, those around her and the environment through which she moves. Contrast this with the woman in my house who now seems to be plugged into her ipod from the moment she awakes. I can appreciate that rather than trying to interact with the world she might want to cut herself off from it. I have no problem with people disappearing into their music. This has been common even before music was recorded and grew in the 1970s when home hi-fis reached good quality and people would lounge back and wear those huge headphones. However, they were tied to a location and if they wanted anything they got up and found you. With the mobile technology, there is no indication if the person is plugged in or not. Unless they are listening to it so loud that you can hear it too, you have no indication of what volume they have it at. Consequently the woman in my house, who is in her mid-30s, bellows through the house like an elderly person would have done thirty years ago. You have to go up to her and tap her to get her attention as you would with a deaf person you wanted to have a sign language conversation with. In addition, being cut off so much makes her highly impatient. When she shouts out a request she cannot hear the response such as 'Coming', 'Just a moment' or 'I'm in the toilet' or whatever so she assumes no-one is responding to her request at all and just shouts more. Unlike with deafness she can switch this thing off so if a few minutes later you go to her and speak loudly, she goes 'No need to shout', again raising tensions in a house.

I am sure this is replicated across the world. I suppose it is more challenging dealing with a mature person as you somehow expect a teenager not to respond or not to hear you. With someone older you tend to think, that if they want to interract with you then they will make the effort to equip themselves to do that. We end up with one-sided conversations in which she asks me something and then does not hear or mis-hears the response. At best I can get her to remove one ear piece, but I find that incredibly rude because then I feel only part of her attention is on what I am saying, especially galling as it is generally when she is asking me to do something. The ipods are almost welded to people, and as with mobile phones, to suggest they might put them down or take them off or even turn them off seems like a personal offence as if you asked them to remove their underpants or bra. The 'other' world provided by these devices is clearly more vital than the current one they are physically in (and do not get me started on people receiving text messages or phone calls during meals).

Even more hazardous is when these people go out on the streets. In contrast to real deaf people, they seem to make no effort to compensate for their impaired senses by being more attentive to what is going on around them. I drive through a number of towns that have universities, some of them have two and if I spot any students on the pavement I slow up as they are likely to simply wander out, especially at traffic lights or crossings, assuming that everyone else is going to stop to let them pass like some sacred animal. I turned into a side road leading to a car park the other day and an ipod wearing student using their mobile was walking in the middle of this side road and was totally oblivious to me being behind them. I had to proceed at their slow walking pace until we reached the broader area of the car park (and where has this fashion for walking on the road rather than the pavement suddenly come from? Is it due to fear of being mugged on the pavement; ironically cyclists of all ages seem habitually to go on the pavement, as noted in 'The Guardian' a couple of weeks ago a woman was aghast at the suggestion she cycle on the road; how topsy-turvy is this country becoming). Even coming out of shops, you often find your way blocked by someone just standing there oblivious to anyone around them. If you dare touch them to ask them to move, well of course that brings down a wall of invective on you, so in the UK we hover in that ineffective hesitant way until the chance comes up and the person moves on. How can city centres function with this sort of behaviour.

As you know, I am the first to complain about bad driving. However, safe driving can only work if all users of the road and pavement do their best to be alert of what is going on around them. Many pedestrians are deliberately detaching themselves from the real world for one more removed. However important the next track on your playlist is or responding to that text, it is less important than preventing yourself becoming another road casualty. We will not even get on to the issues of politeness and not being an obstacle when around town, just think about keeping yourself and others alive.