Highway Code for Incompetents.

‘Never ascribe to malice that which can adequately be explained by incompetence.’
-Napoleon Bonaparte.

I want a pair of M2HB machine guns mounted on my car. I also want the legal right to use them at appropriate moments.

The appropriate moments to which I refer occur when my progress along the road is impeded by a moron who either didn’t read the highway code, has made a conscious decision to ignore the rules and guidelines presented therein, or, worst of all, did in fact read it but lacks the requisite number of active brain cells to put the knowledge to practical use.

When I am halfway round a roundabout, and the halfwit who pulled onto that roundabout at the same time as me, indicating to go right, suddenly swerves to the left as they approach an exit half way round the roundabout, having either changed their mind half way round or got the whole process completely wrong right from the start, I should have the legal right to move in behind the offender and riddle the vehicle and its driver with several .50 calibre BMG bullets.

Other roundabout offenders who should suffer my hail of vengeful lead are those who enter a roundabout in the left lane, then veer into the right lane half way round, then back to the left lane as they exit the roundabout.

Bad lane discipline on roundabouts is the most heinous and life threatening crime that I witness daily as I drive my children and wife back and forth from wherever we are going that day. Those dim-witted legally qualified drivers who regularly perform this crime deserve to suffer the fury of my nose-mounted M2HBs.

As I drive past the smoking wreckage of the offender’s vehicle to continue my journey, I can smile in satisfaction, knowing that the roads are now safer and freer flowing due to my having rid the country of an idiot who cannot drive properly. Okay, admittedly there may be a little congestion while the wreckage gets cleared away, but the long-term benefits of exterminating these road vermin are immeasurable.

I do not claim to be the best driver in the country. But I do get through a journey without causing - by my being in the wrong place or making a manoeuvre incorrectly - any other drivers to brake hard or swerve aside to avoid a crash. I expect everyone else to do the same. This is not an unreasonable expectation.

Everyone who possesses a driving license has went through a lot of training and practice, and passed a test under the eye of a rigorous examiner. They should all therefore be expected to drive properly.

Driving properly involves maintaining good lane discipline. It involves using your mirrors to know what’s happening behind and around your own vehicle. It involves thinking ahead and knowing where you’re going before you have an ‘oh shit, that was my corner’ moment and change direction suddenly, causing others to swerve or brake to avoid a collision with you. It involves using your indicators, so that the traffic is not held up unnecessarily because other road users fail to receive the telepathic messages you are transmitting to tell them where you are going.

It also involves driving at the speed limit. And I’m not going to complain about people driving fast here: speed doesn’t kill; incompetent idiots kill. What bugs me is people driving slower than the speed limit. People who drive at 40mph on a road that has a legal speed limit of 60mph, when the conditions are safe and there is no reason to be going slow, deserve to be purged from the world. When I was learning to drive, my instructor never permitted me to drive at 20mph slower than the legal limit. The speed of a road is the speed at which it has been judged safe to drive on that road, and the speed at which normal traffic should be expected to be moving on that road. This is not an unreasonable expectation either.

Just as a related point of interest, it is amazing how many of those who drive at 40 in a 60, then enter a 30 zone and keep driving at 40. Their inconsistency demonstrates quite well their lack of understanding about proper driving, and their total disregard for the safety of other people.

When conditions aren’t good, like in very wet or foggy conditions, sensible drivers slow down and take extra care. Those who don’t are idiots.

A note on fog. All cars have fog lights. These bright lights are there to alert other road users to your presence in poor visibility. Using them is sensible. But the roads are polluted by morons who don’t use them properly. The Highway Code states that you should only turn on your fog lights when visibility has dropped to below 100 metres.

BELOW 100 METRES! As in ‘less than 100 metres’. Meaning that if you can still see other cars that are within 100 metres, you should not turn on your fog lights. What’s complicated about that? Obviously I am far more intelligent than most people, because that sounds fairly simple to me, but the roads are full of people who turn on their fog lights as soon as they spot a low cloud.

Also, the Highway Code instructs us to turn the fog lights off when visibility returns to normal. At least my copy of it does. I am starting to believe though that I may have a rare misprint of the Highway Code, because most peoples’ obviously says something like: ‘Once visibility has returned to normal, you must keep your fog lights on for at least 48 hours, in order to blind everyone who drives behind you.’

Car Parks. There’s another bugbear. Specifically the direction of traffic in car parks. Most car parks now are quite large affairs with multiple lanes. The ground of these car parks is decorated with large (about four foot long) white arrows showing us all which way to go. I say ‘decorated’ because that is all most people seem to think they are for; to break up the monotony of grey tarmac. Certainly, most people ignore them and go whatever way they want, then look at me as if I’m the idiot because I’m facing the ‘wrong’ direction and getting in their way.

Feel the wrath of my machine guns!

There are more. Many, many more examples that I could mention, but in the interest of keeping the word-count to a level that most people will read, I’ll content myself with the examples made so far.

If you are a good driver yourself, you doubtless agree with everything I’ve said. Apart from maybe machine-gunning people. Most folk don’t get quite that angry. Maybe I was shot with a machine gun as a child and the deep emotional scars have left me with a propensity for gunning down those who upset me.

Certainly, gunning the offenders from the road would be an effective cure, but it isn’t really PC is it? As prevention is always better than cure, maybe there is a way to prevent these people from polluting the roads.

IQ tests maybe? Apart from your theory and practical test, maybe you should have to pass an IQ test to be allowed to drive a car unsupervised? (On a similar vein I think IQ tests should be passed before you are allowed to have children, but that’s a discussion for another day).

Maybe giving driving licences out in different grades?

You must achieve grade A to be permitted to drive anywhere anytime.

If you get a grade B, you are mostly free to drive, but you are not allowed out at the busiest times, say between 2pm-6pm on weekdays.

Grade C means you are only allowed to endanger other road users by your presence on a Sunday, and weekdays between 10pm-5am.

I think that would work. It would help a little at least.

But sadly, as with so many of my brilliant ideas to improve society, it probably won’t see much approval from the masses. Oh well. Guess I’ll just have to put up with getting pissed off every time I get behind the wheel. Though I will need a new steering wheel soon as I’ve nearly chewed through the current one.

The Ignorance to Cancer

'Ignorance is not innocence but sin.'
-Robert Browning.

On Sunday 26th March 2006, Scotland’s First Minister Jack McConnell became probably the first politician who has ever done something that earned my complete agreement, support and admiration.

The ban on smoking in public places in Scotland was a significant step towards ridding us of this horrible, disgusting, repulsive affliction. Normally I am of the opinion that people should be permitted to do what they want, as long as they are not directly harming or inconveniencing anyone else.

But smoking does harm and inconvenience other people. Everyone knows it does. Everyone knows that smoking causes cancer and other diseases, not only in the smokers themselves but also in other people who are exposed to their second-hand smoke.

It amazes me that people still smoke. I find it really truly astoundingly confusing that people ignore the weight of scientific and empirical evidence, and continue to suck these poisons into their own bodies. More than my amazement that they do this to themselves is my disbelief at the overwhelmingly ignorant, selfish and uncaring manner in which they inflict it on others.

I can’t believe that people don’t understand or believe that cigarette smoke is harmful. There is simply too much evidence and recorded fact. If you don’t believe me, do some research of your own; there’s an abundance of information out there.

There has been decades of research - since 1900 – which has proven a link with tobacco smoking and cancer in the lung, larynx, head, neck, stomach, bladder, kidney, oesophagus and pancreas, and there is a proven, definite correlation between the numbers of adult men who smoke, and the numbers of adult men diagnosed with lung cancer.

About 114,000 people die in the UK every year as a direct result of tobacco smoking.

Tobacco smoking causes 90% of lung cancer cases, and is responsible for one in three of all cancer related deaths in the developed world.

Cigarettes contain over 4,000 toxic chemicals, about 50 of which are known to cause cancer. Apart from the obvious nicotine, carbon monoxide and tar, cigarettes are known to contain acetone (which is nail polish remover), ammonia (which is toilet cleaner), arsenic (which is rat poison), dieldrin (which is an insecticide), formaldehyde (which is used to preserve dead bodies), hydrogen cyanide (which is the poison used in gas chambers), methanol (which is rocket fuel) and titanium (which is a metal used to make aeroplanes). I could go on, but I think the point has been made. The list is extensive, and everything on it is as worrying as those mentioned.

Second-hand smoke is dangerous to passive inhalers, and is especially harmful to children, as their bodies are still developing. Children who grow up in smoking households are known to be far more likely to suffer from asthma, middle ear infections, chest infections, coughs and colds. Medical research also suggests that they are more susceptible to meningitis.

Cot death is twice as likely for babies whose mothers smoke.

It’s bad enough - ignorantly, immorally repugnant enough - that people smoke in the company of other adults; they at least have the chance to voice an objection or leave the area. To do so in the presence of children, to pass on your exhaled poison onto helpless children, takes selfishness and ignorance to levels unapproached by any other social act that a person could perform.

Recent times have seen people start to see sense where smoking is concerned. There are fewer smokers now than there used to be. The number of adults in the UK smoking has dropped drastically, from over 60% of men and over 40% for women in 1948, to less than 25% for both men and women in 2007. That can only be a good thing. It is a step in the right direction. But only a small step. There’s still far, far too much of it.

The smoking ban in Scotland has, strangely, been faced with criticism. Some people proclaim the economic doom that will inevitably ensue. Apart from the fact that the evidence of New York and Ireland show that the economic effects are minimal and temporary, I can’t help but thinking ‘so what?’ So what if there is a bit of economic hardship and pubs don’t sell as much alcohol? The health benefits for the nation far outweigh that inconvenience, and the health of our children is of paramount importance and should take precedence over any other factor. If you disagree with that, then I believe your morals and your very humanity should be questioned.

There exists an organisation known as Forest. They are the smokers’ lobby group. They actively campaign for the rights of smokers. Even they aren’t silly enough to try and deny the harmful effects of smoking. But still they insist that people have a right to do it. Still they campaign for the rights of people to willingly and knowingly damage not only their own bodies but also those of others. In my mind, such an organisation dwells in the same category as politically abhorrent parties like the BNP.

Obviously, I am utterly anti-smoking. But not all cancer is caused by smoking. Apart from smoking, it has been thoroughly demonstrated that excessive alcohol consumption, physical inactivity and obesity are contributing factors to cancer. These are all lifestyle issues. No-one has to smoke, drink lots of alcohol, shirk from physical activity, or allow themselves to become obese. They can all be avoided. Everyone knows that excessive alcohol, lack of exercise and obesity are unhealthy. But a lot of people simply choose to ignore such facts.

As well as the lifestyle factors mentioned above, a lot of cancer causes are largely a product of environmental factors, and are therefore avoidable or rectifiable. Every year there are at least 200,000 known cases of cancer caused by environmental contamination in the workplace. Why is this accepted?

Taking into account all causes, an awful lot of people suffer and die from cancer every year. The most recent fully detailed information available in the UK is from 2007, showing that 80,907 men and 74,557 women died of cancer in the UK that year. That’s 29% of total male mortality and 25% of total female mortality.

Why is this permitted to continue?

We support cancer care and cancer research. And quite rightly too. In my own life, I have seen four people who I cared for very much succumb to this disease and die far younger than they should have. There have been other members of my family, and the families of friends, diagnosed with cancer and been given treatment with varying degrees of success. Out of the love we felt for these victims, and the desire to see others saved the trauma of facing it, we support research into cancer.

But it isn’t enough.

It’s not nearly enough to merely trust in the scientists to develop better treatments, to hope that maybe one day they will discover a cure. Treatment and cures wouldn’t be required if the disease didn’t exist. Obviously, we will never be rid of it, but as the vast majority of cancer cases are related to lifestyle or environment, it is largely avoidable if people cared enough.

If people cared enough for their own health, took some responsibility for their own well-being. If the government and large businesses cared enough to take control of the situation and actually do something about it. If we didn’t have tobacco companies who were driven by the greed for money.

If people cared, and did something about it, we could fight back against this horrible, insidious, life destroying disease.

Instead, we do what we do with everything else. We put on the blinkers. We suffer from apathy. We ignore it until it affects us personally.

They say that everyone will know three people who suffer from cancer. I have already passed my quota. I don’t want to see it again. But I probably will, because the society in which we live is still blind, stupid, greedy, selfish and uncaring enough to largely ignore the problem.

The smoking ban was a significant first step. But it was only the first. We need a lot more.