They really fucking annoy me.

The British Medical Association wants smoking banned in all cars.

There are so many things that are wrong about this that I’m not sure where to start.

First of all, the figures used by the BMA [supposedly the medical authority] that smoke in cars is 23 times stronger that the levels found in a smoky pub are based on nothing more than junk science and have actually been retracted in a very quiet press release.  Of course the damage is done now and the Antis are gleefully quoting the original figure.

All that apart, I would ask what right anyone has to dictate what I do in my car?  Maybe an argument could be made for not smoking in a car with children present but what about when I am the only occupant?  Are they claiming that my smoking produces second hand smoke that may kill me?  My car is my own space.  I paid heavily for the car and each year I pay heavily for insurance, road tax and a car test.  Every time I pull into the pumps I give the government another great whack of my cash.  I pay dearly to run my car and no one is going to tell me what I can or cannot do in it.  As far as I am concerned, if I want to do something in my car that doesn’t affect the safety of my driving, I will do it.

There is not one single justification for this intrusion into privacy.  It is just another spiteful attempt to denormalise smokers and presumably to extort more money from them in fines.

You may wonder why I am so worked up about something that won’t affect me, but unfortunately Ireland seems to have signed up to the race to see who can produce the harshest anti-smoker regime.  What happens in the UK will inevitably happen here.

One aspect of this proposed ban which I haven’t seen mentioned is the effect of forcing drivers not to smoke.  Smoking has been proved to improve concentration, and also smokers find the odd cigarette to be soothing.  Both these benefits can only be an aid to driving.  Similarly, preventing someone from smoking can produce a shortness of temper and a distraction.

I would consider myself to be a reasonably good driver.  In the forty years I have been driving I have had many accidents – too many to count, but I was to blame in only one of those accidents when my brakes failed.  I consider myself to be a calm and considerate driver.  I may pass the odd comment when I witness bad driving but I’m not one to wave two fingers out the window or even to yell profanities.

Some years ago, I stopped smoking.  One of the things I noticed was the way my driving changed.  I admit that my driving became atrocious.  I became aggressive and angry, and shudder to think of the accidents that I very nearly caused.  There were a few reasons why I went back to smoking the pipe, and one of the major ones was because I literally terrified of my own driving.  Once I started smoking again, the old placid, considerate driver returned.

I would therefore make a simple prediction.  If this ban is imposed in the U.K. I predict that the accident rate is going to noticeably increase as will the incidents of “road rage”.

You have been warned.

-oOo-

This article also appears in Smoking out the Truth.

When he was finished doing what he had to do on it, he dropped it back to me.

“Your tyres” he said.  Spanner can be infuriatingly laconic at times.

“What about ‘em?”

“They’re getting old.  They don’t meet the requirements.”

He pointed out that three of the tyres had fine hair cracks on them and the fourth was a little worn.  There was still plenty tread on them so I asked what he meant about requirements.  Apparently all tyres have to have some fucking symbol on them and mine didn’t.  I asked what the hell he was talking about and he told me that EU regulations demanded that all tyres have a particular symbol and that in future my car would fail the NCT if I didn’t have it.  I asked what would happen if the tyres were in perfect nick and he said it didn’t matter; that tyres were obliged to have the symbol.

Fucking EU and their fucking regulations.

A few weeks ago I noticed that the car was sitting on a flat tyre.

Bollox!

I pumped it up with the foot pump and it was fine.  I have driven many miles since then and the tyre behaved itself.

Yesterday it was flat again.

Bollox!

I hate intermittent faults and this was obviously an intermittent puncture.  It worried me as I intend to do a fair bit of driving in the next couple of weeks on very fast roads and in a country where I don’t speak the lingo.  I have also found through bitter experience that garages tend to be few and far between in France.  It was time to do something.  As all the tyres had to be replaced sooner or later I decided to go the whole hog and get them all replaced.

I brought the car into Skobieville, as Spanner doesn’t do tyres.  He says they are beneath his dignity.

I strode into the tyre place and asked for four of their best remoulds.

They told me they didn’t do remoulds any more, which is a damned shame as I have literally driven hundreds of thousands of miles on remoulds since I started driving.  They did the job, were a lot cheaper and I never had any problems with them.  I asked why not.

“EU regulations.  They have banned remoulds” says yer man behind the counter.

What the fuck is it about the EU?  Every fucking corner I turn I get some new fucking EU regulation rammed at me.  And it’s always something niggly and trivial. 

Are they deliberately trying to piss me off? 

They’re succeeding.

Shower of fucking cunts.

Just in case there are a couple of you who haven’t been reading this site since its inception, I had better explain.

Our lane used to be a private lane, but then the County Council took it in hand.  Some of us were a little chuffed by this as it meant we wouldn’t have to maintain it any more.  However, the Council had other plans.

What they have done is to build a sort of breeding ground for potholes.  I’m not sure whether they plant pothole seeds or what, but they are growing them at a fierce rate so that our lane is probably the premier pothole nursery in the county.

When the potholes are fully fledged the Council comes along and harvests them .  They are then transplanted out onto the main roads throughout the area.  Quite a few times in the past I have had to swerve on a main road to avoid a pothole that I recognised from our lane.  When you rattle across them on a daily basis, you rapidly get to know and love each individual pothole, and it’s nice to see them being put to good use where the whole population can crash into them.

Apparently today is another harvest day.  The Council are out there with a load of heavy machinery, the lane is reasonably smooth once more and a fleet of lorries is ferrying the potholes to all the areas that really need them.  I’ll miss them as I had grown quite fond of this latest crop.

It will take a little while to get used to the fact that I can drive the lane at more than two miles per hour or that I can actually drive in a straight line without risking tyre, wheel rim, suspension or my nerves.

I’m not worried though.

I know that in a week or two the new crop will have taken root and will be growing at a rate of knots.  Soon it will be infested with a new batch of holes that will grow to greet me every time I try and drive out the lane.

I just hope they’ll be big enough in time for the Winter Harvest.

Sandy came too.  In fact she drove to the shops as the warm weather was making me sleepy. 

Normally, when we get to the shops I get out and Sandy stays in the driver’s seat.  She is very proud of that seat and will sit there huffing at people as they pass by,  Quite often she draws a small crowd – “Ah! Would ya look at the dog! It thinks it can drive.”  This pisses Sandy off mightily and quite often she will run those people over on the way home.

Anyhows, Sandy usually only comes with me when I am going to the coffee shop.This time was different.  I had decided to buy her a safety harness as she has this habit of smacking her nose off the dashboard whenever I stop suddenly or run into someone.  Naturally I had to buy her one that fitted, and that meant bringing her into the shop with me.  Unfortunately she got the idea from somewhere that she was at the vet so she wasn’t very cooperative.

After several fittings, we found a harness that fitted her perfectly.  Then I saw that the shop also sold those poo-gathering yokes.  It occurred to me that one of those might be handy in France as we shall be staying in rented accommodation and it don’t want to leave it full of crap.  I’m thoughtful like that.  There were two types of poo-gatherer – a short handled version and a long handled version.  I asked Sandy which one she preferred and she said that quite honestly she didn’t give a shite either way.  I bought the short handled one.

Before heading home, I put Sandy’s new harness on.  I had to drive as she now couldn’t reach the pedals.  She sat there looking rather annoyed as I drove home. 

On the way, I decided to test the harness.  There was no point in just jamming on the breaks, as I knew Sandy would just brace herself.  So just to catch her on the hop I ran into the back of an old biddy in a Fiat Punto.  The harness worked perfectly, which is more than can be said about the Punto’s rear bumper.

Sandy has become very attached to the harness now and insists on wearing it all the time.

She is already muttering about going back to the shop for matching accessories.

She can fuck off.

Typical bloody woman! 

Last winter, I occasionally had to charge the battery.  There was nothing strange in that as quite often I wouldn’t drive far enough to recharge it after a cold start.

Winter passed into spring and I was still having to give it a bit if a boost with the old charger.  It became a fortnightly chore.  As the weeks passed fortnightly became weekly and lately became daily.

I don’t mind having to charge it, except that I occasionally forget it’s on charge and leave it out there with the engine open to the elements.  After a few rainy nights, I now have a nice clean engine.

The time has come for a new battery.

One thing that struck me about all this faffing about with batteries – what the hell happened to the good old starting handle?  In the Good Old Days, if the battery was dead, you simply rammed in the starting handle, gave it a couple of cranks and away you’d go.  Also there used to be a wee ammeter on the dashboard that warned you if the battery was charging or discharging.  And if they say that there is no need for these gizmos these days as batteries are so reliable, then I would like to point them in the direction of my car.

Of course the Brain Dead and the Alarmists are constantly shouting these days about electric cars.  They are “the way of the future”.

Hah!

I’ll tell you one thing.

If the car of the future runs on batteries like mine, then we are all fucked.

For various reasons, I haven’t been travelling too far, so I just brought Roger with me so I could practice shouting at him.

Last weekend however, I found myself travelling somewhat further abroad, and it involved some motorway driving.

I was merrily pootling along and wasn’t too far from the exit I was aiming for, when Roger gave a loud BONG.  Nothing else, just a single BONG.  I gave him a dirty look, and then realised why he had BONGed – the screen was now showing a picture of the exit ahead, and it showed dirty great arrows in the lane I was supposed to take.  How the fuck did it know what the junction looked like?  Don’t tell me that it has pictures of every fucking junction in Europe because I would find that very hard to believe.  The picture was pretty accurate except for one thing – it didn’t show the Oul Biddy in her Toyota that I carved up before swinging across and making my exit.  So it’s not that smart.  Hah!

Another thing that annoyed me was that it kept binging at me.  BING BING BING in quick succession.  It was irritating to say the least.  What’s more I couldn’t immediately find out why it was BING BING BINGing all the time.  Every couple of hundred feet it would merrily BING BING BING for no apparent reason whatsoever.

Then I realised what was wrong with it.

The little fucker was complaining because I was exceeding the speed limit.  The little fucking shit.  It’s bad enough having the Nanny State moaning constantly on television that ‘speed kills’ but now Roger is in on the act too.

Somehow I am going to have to try to find some way of overriding that speed limit BING.  It’s too fucking annoying.

My SatNav has become a SatNag.

For the one or two of you who give a shite, Roger was my SatNav who faithfully navigated me around Ireland and France, and did his best to kill me in the process.

I decided I needed Roger as we will be trotting off onto the continent again this Summer, and I confess I find it quite difficult navigating motorways while reading a huge Michelin map at the same time.  The map tends to obscure the view.

The new Roger arrived the other day.  The main reason I chose the model is that it has a larger screen, but it does have some other interesting features.  One of those features is voice recognition.  Naturally I had to try this out.

“Howya Roger” I shouted at it.

Nothing happened.

I tried a few more times, and eventually Roger responded, but only when I was holding the yoke in front of my mouth and yelling at the top of my voice.  Not good.

I tried it again yesterday, while our K8 was in the car.  Naturally she wasn’t impressed.  She rarely is.  She asked if I had to train it, and I said that no, it was supposed to understand me straight away.

“Maybe it’s your accent?” she suggested.

I pointed out that I don’t have an accent.

She replied that maybe that was the problem.  She asked what options there were.  I replied that I was given a choice of a load of languages including English [American] or English [British].  She asked if there was an English [Ireland] and I confessed that there wasn’t.

“There’s your answer” says she, “Try using an English accent”.

I tried that out last night.  I tried a Geordie accent.  No joy. I tried a Brummie accent [reputed to be the ugliest accent in the UK] and fortunately that didn’t work as it gave me throat ache.  I ran the gamut of the various accents from Norfolk to Cornwall and eventually Roger started responding. 

The English have a peculiar habit of losing their Rs, unless they are from the West Country.  [No jokes about knowing their Rs from their elbows, please…]   I ended up sounding like a Public School Jonathan Ross on steroids.

“Aaah yoo theyah, Wojah?” I would shout.  And Roger would respond.  Every time.

“White Wojah! Diwect me to the jolly old pub” I would shout.  Roger would resume his muteness.

I can see I will have my work cut out training Roger.

Or maybe I’ll just go back to tapping the screen.

*sigh*

I never heard such a load of horsecrap in all my life.

“These vans are there to save lives and not raise revenue”

Bollox.

Those vans haven’t saved a single life and they never will.  Motorists aren’t going to change the habits of a lifetime just because of the off chance of being caught by one. 

Time and time again, I have argued that speed does not kill.  Bad driving kills and that has fuck all to do with speed.  Which is worse – a driver doing 60 in a 50 limit on a clear stretch of road, or a driver overtaking at 30 on a blind bend?  Speed is only dangerous if it is inappropriate under the circumstances and those circumstances cannot be determined by some jobsworth in the local council who decides to introduce a limit.

The idiot in the film is delighted that they have increased ‘detection’ by 60%.  Of course he is delighted – that is a 60% increase in revenue.  And have they saved a single life?  Of course not.  Not unless a bloke was just about to do something reckless and stopped when he saw the van.

The authorities know damn well that the vans are just money boxes on wheels.  Why else would they be going to such pains to tell us that they are not?  We have that irritating advertisement showing lifebuoys that turn into cameras to try to convince us that they are to do with safety.  They just call them ‘Safety Cameras’ to try to give a cosy cosy impression that they are there to help us and keep us safe.  If anything, they are liable to cause accidents, as drivers will be concentrating on the possibility of a trap instead of concentrating on the road.

What a load of shite.

Money box on wheels

Safe money box on wheels

Methinks it is nearly time to revive an old business that used to prove very profitable.

All I have to do is get the word out that I am pally with one of the Driving Test examiners.  For €50 I can guarantee a pass.

The way it works is very simple.  You come to me and I tell you that I can fix your driving test for you.  You bung me the fifty spot which I promise to pass onto my friend.  Even better, I provide a money back guarantee.  If you pass your test, your fifty yoyos are well spent.  If you fail your test, you come back to me, whereupon I apologise and say that my friend was off duty that day, and I proceed to give you your money back.

Our local test centre has a pass rate around the fifty percent mark, which means I keep around fifty percent of the bungs.

Simple.

Everyone is happy.

Especially me.