(no subject)
Still here?
Wenyu attended a speed awareness course today. For me, it's worth the £90 cost, just to see her given the first official driving instruction she'll have had in a decade. Frankly, it baffles me that someone can pass the test once and be deemed safe for life. Is there really any wonder we have 3,000 deaths per year on British roads, a million world wide. Give it fifty or a hundred years, they'll all be laughing at us for this. Can you believe people used to brush their teeth with radium? They did, and let me tell you how things were when people had motor cars.
I remind myself that at work the H&S policy says we have to reassess our volunteer buggy drivers every year, this for a vehicle that does about 8mph on a good day of carting biddies around the estate. The same volunteers, and I suppose very often the same infirm visitors too for that matter, are then free to drive home among other road users at 60mph under a licence procured maybe 30 years or more ago.
But then what do I know? How can I criticise? I'm not a motorist. I wonder though, maybe if I was, if I did drive, maybe then I too would think swearing and cursing and beeping was the solution to the bad habits of other motorists, maybe then I would comprehend that a regime of regular retests would be just inconveniencing to me, a sledgehammer to crack a nut, and that those 3,000 deaths a year, well they're mostly not me or people I know. Maybe then, behind the wheel at 60mph, I'd understand why being a safer driver is the last thing I'd want myself or anyone else to be.
Wenyu attended a speed awareness course today. For me, it's worth the £90 cost, just to see her given the first official driving instruction she'll have had in a decade. Frankly, it baffles me that someone can pass the test once and be deemed safe for life. Is there really any wonder we have 3,000 deaths per year on British roads, a million world wide. Give it fifty or a hundred years, they'll all be laughing at us for this. Can you believe people used to brush their teeth with radium? They did, and let me tell you how things were when people had motor cars.
I remind myself that at work the H&S policy says we have to reassess our volunteer buggy drivers every year, this for a vehicle that does about 8mph on a good day of carting biddies around the estate. The same volunteers, and I suppose very often the same infirm visitors too for that matter, are then free to drive home among other road users at 60mph under a licence procured maybe 30 years or more ago.
But then what do I know? How can I criticise? I'm not a motorist. I wonder though, maybe if I was, if I did drive, maybe then I too would think swearing and cursing and beeping was the solution to the bad habits of other motorists, maybe then I would comprehend that a regime of regular retests would be just inconveniencing to me, a sledgehammer to crack a nut, and that those 3,000 deaths a year, well they're mostly not me or people I know. Maybe then, behind the wheel at 60mph, I'd understand why being a safer driver is the last thing I'd want myself or anyone else to be.