| I was driving back home, northwards past Junction 8 on the M1. It was around 7pm in the middle of the Friday evening rush and the weather was so bad that it was one of those torrential downpours where your wipers are on full speed and still fighting a losing battle. It was also dark. Just seeing where you were going was a white knuckle job. The traffic was the typical stop-go traffic that gets up to about 40mph and then comes to a sudden halt.
A guy in a Rover came past me in the outside lane with the interior light on and I saw that he had a book on his steering wheel and was reading it. It wasn't just a glance, he was intent on reading and flipping the pages over as if he was in his armchair at home. He must've been driving just on his peripheral vision and his concentration in those conditions was just about zero. It was one of the only times that I've taken someones number and pulled into the nearest police station to report them.
The thing that really gets me is how lazy people get with their indicators. I got carved up by a Mercedes convertible by a guy that didn't use his indicators once in a journey of 30 miles. I wasn't following him, we were both going the same route by coincidence. It was a warm day and I had the roof down on my car as well as he did.
Just by chance, we reached some traffic lights where our route was obviously diverging. He was in the right turn lane as I wanted to go left, but by chance we were queued up side by side. So I looked across at him and said "Nice car mate, how much did it cost?", "About 35K" he replied. So I said "You know, on cars that cost that much you'll find there's a stalk near the steering wheel and if you flip it up or down it'll make lights flash on the side of your car that let other drivers know where you're going instead of haveing to use fecking telepathy"  |