Prior decides that no punishment is too great for those who exit a roundabout without signalling
I’ve decided that no punishment is too great for those who exit a roundabout without signalling to those around them.
Three times in the past few weeks, I’ve been waiting for a car on approach from my right, which has then taken the exit before it reached me without indicating, leaving me waiting, deflated, dejected. Quietly furious.
Now, I’m a generous, forgiving sort of bloke, but really this is beyond the pale. And I’m also a bit squeamish, so if somebody else could do the fingernail-pulling, that would be grand.
There’s a phrase about somebody not ‘lifting a finger’ to help a fellow citizen. Here’s the literal illustration of it. Their finger remains unpoised, their stalk untapped.
If only they would glance right as they exit, they might see my own raised fingers in the form of some flicked Vs. But alas, they never do, which only makes it worse.
Those few micro-calories they could exert indicating go unburnt and the fleeting amount of thought it takes goes unused. I can be pretty lazy, I can tell you. Ask my leaking bathroom tap. But the effort to pop on an indicator is so minuscule as to be insignificant, given its value.
Besides, what the hell else are they doing that’s so crucial that they don’t have the mental capacity to do it? Does listening to somebody calling a radio station to wang on about cancel culture or a Ken Bruce Popmaster contestant ‘saying a few hellos’ really take all of their remaining concentration?
I know, I should probably get out more. This isn’t a major inconvenience in and of itself. I’ve probably spent more time in my life trying to spell ‘manoeuvre’ correctly than waiting needlessly at roundabouts. But still, unlike the old cliché asserts, time isn’t money: it’s far more precious.
Say, on average, this stuff costs me five seconds a week. People getting on aeroplanes pretending massive wheelie bags that they can’t lift properly are hand baggage probably delay my journeys by more than that (come my otherwise benign dictatorship, they will be the first against the wall).
But five seconds a week over a year is still four minutes and 20 seconds.
If I drive for (let’s be optimistic) another 50 years, that’s more than three and a half hours of waiting at roundabouts for goons to turn left without telling me.
By the time I factor in how much sleep I need during the next half-century, how long I will spend at work, how much time I will need to eat, exercise, socialise, do chores, have holidays, shop, tie shoelaces and watch videos of cats knocking things off tables, I don’t think I’ve got three and a half hours to spare.
I don’t know what the answer is. There are a lot of us, we’re literally going in opposite directions and nobody I know would be such a git, so the chances of me meeting a perpetrator are slim. But if and when I do, I shall ask: exactly what are you not thinking?
There’s no where quite like the Bicester Scramble
Pictured below is a Mini that I spotted at Bicester Heritage’s last Scramble of the year. From a distance, I thought it was mid-engined. But no, it has a Honda VTEC unit up front, occupying so much space that the radiators are at the back. Beautifully done.
Among conventional supercars and high-end classics, I also saw a drag race-style Volkswagen Beetle and an 800kg Morris Minor with a spaceframe chassis and a 360bhp Cosworth engine. There’s nowhere else quite like it.
