Ireland is the fastest country in Europe
Grandad September 13th, 2007
You may or may not be aware that the pint is safe.
The E.U. in all its wisdom has decided that the U.K. and Ireland may retain our imperial measurements, like the mile and the pound [weight, not money] and the pint.
A couple of years ago, the government spent a fortune metricating our speeds on the roads. All the speed limit signs had to be changed and we were inundated with advertising and little reminder stickers to put on our windscreens.
I even got the instruments in my car metricated.
So where do we stand now?
I rang the Department yesterday to find out. I eventually got onto a very nice girl, but she seemed a bit upset.
I asked her what she was upset about, and she told me that she was sitting in the dark, because the new Green minister, John Gormley wouldn’t allow them use electricity as it was environmentally unfriendly. So she had no light or computer and hadn’t been able to update her Bebo account in weeks. I pointed out she could do that from home, but apparently she can’t find her way out of the office, because Gormley had the windows bricked up to save heat, and it’s so dark in there that she can’t find the door.
It seems she has been surviving all summer by eating memos and drinking Tippex. But she’s bursting to go to the loo.
I asked her what the situation was, now that we are back to driving miles instead of kilometers, and presumably speeding at miles per hour and not kilometers per hour. I asked if they were going to change all the speed signs back again.
She said that they still had all the old signs and were keeping them in storage along with the electronic voting machines. However, she said that they wouldn’t be replacing them again as it would cost too much, and would confuse too many people.
So they have decided we can interpret the signs as we wish. When you see a speed limit sign that says 100, you can interpret that as 100 mph, or 100kph.
She said she’d confirm that by email as soon as she could find her way out, and could get to the nearest Internet cafe.
So, in the meantime, I’m heading off for the nearest motorway to see if I can hit 120 miles per hour.
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