The Road

You know well by now my paranoiac linkage of disparate things. Something heard on the radio yester twigged this. I was going to write something amusing about driving in France, but after a week and 24 hours total driving time, I'm not as amused as I could be.

Somebody on the radio was talking about Michael Howard, and whether he'd be able to make people forget that he was part of the last conservative government. And one of the contributors said that he knew too many people who were personally and professionally affected by the 79-97 Tory era, and who bitterly resented that period of our political history.

I agree. Personally, I think the fabric of our society was thoroughly unstitched by Thatcher and her inheritors. Tony Weasel's government of a slightly different shade of blue is continuing the process. If we thought it was bad in the mid-late 70s, we knew nothing of what was to come, though there were plenty who warned against it.

Monetarism, supply-side economics, whatever you call it, was responsible for destroying jobs and disrupting lives, buggering communities into the ground. We were left with a service economy based on retail parks and call centres, and even the call centres are flowing their inevitable way to countries with lower costs and standards of living.

But it's the micropolitical aspects of it that will get you in the end. The 60s feminists identified the personal as political, and it's the ongoing, every-day, repetitive hammering of selfishness, ignorance, obliviousness, and virtual solipsism that grinds your spirit into the dust.

So take driver behaviour. Sure, there are a lot more cars and drivers on the road than there were in 1979. But actually, this should make people more, not less, courteous and thoughtful. Because living in society means learning how to be social. And social, as any anthropologist will tell you = moral. To be antisocial is to be immoral. Except the Thatcherites managed to convince people that society didn't matter, that only the individual matters. What, did they think that each individual had his/her own moral compass and would know how to behave?

Current trends in driving which are the sign of all this are the following:

• Dazzle
  
• Frazzle
  
• Hassle
  

What could I possibly mean? Dazzle, folks, is the bane of my driving life. I'm so fucking sick of the tits who drive around all fucking day with their fog lights on. Front fog lights. You know who I'm talking about. People who leave their back fog lights on are just dumb as a sack of tacks, but the front fog light is a fuck-you to the world. They go with the baseball cap and the sunglasses as the accoutrements of the shit driver, the essential fashion accessories of those who are concerned with how they look in their cars. They're not even useful in the fog, because, hey, they just light up the fog. The only safety feature you need for the fog is to slow down, remembering the rule that you should be able to brake to a stop within the distance you can actually see.

Front fog lights are bad enough, but they're joined on my list of things to hate by those stupid blue-ish (and stupidly expensive) ultra-bright headlamps, which are another fuck-you to the world. They're so stupidly bright and dazzling that you forget your rear view mirror is on the dimmer setting. I wish there was a way of having a mirror pop up at the back of your car, James Bond style, and dazzle the bastards back.

There used to be a public service announcement on the telly, back in the day, the "Don't Dazzle, Dip" one. But even if you showed it now, even if you ran a campaign, I'm convinced it would only encourage people to worse feats of hot-poker blinding and dazzling. Because it's not just that they're selfish and ignorant and stupid, but they're aggressive and nasty with it.

Frazzle is what happens when you're in that crowd, that jam, that gridlock, as I was on Saturday afternoon, driving back from France. After a totally smooth and trouble-free journey, with the best possible timing of arriving at La Cocquelles and getting straight onto Le Shuttle, 3 hours ahead of schedule, we hit the M25 and ground to a halt. We were all in the same boat, but some of us had to sit and watch the lane swappers, the hoppers, the queue jumpers, nipping in and out, back and forth, sneaking up here and there. And it's not just that you're watching them, but you're watching the same ones, for two hours, because actually all their swapping and nipping and pushing in and cutting up does nothing to advance their cause. They just piss everyone else off. And they don't care.

It's like that outside lane thing. You know, like yesterday on the M1, when there was a queue of cars in the outside lane, all too close to each other, and almost nobody at all in the inside lane, also known as the slow lane. This is a mild irritation. After many years of watching this moronic behaviour, especially the morons (call them optimists) who tear up the slip road to get on the motorway and then zoom across into the outside lane, as if being in either of the two "slow" lanes will kill them; it's the "I can't allow my BMW to be seen in the slow lane" syndrome; so after these many years, I've come to the conclusion that I might as well use the inside lane, and I do, and I overtake people on the inside. A lot. I know you're not supposed to do it, but I do it in the knowledge that it will enrage all the selfish fascists in the so-called "fast" lane, and that the person in the middle lane I'm overtaking is actually too scared to change lanes.

The easy solution to this would be to paint the words "BUS LANE" all the way up the inside lane, because then it would be a matter of pride for all the BMW and Mercedes and Audi drivers to drive along it.

And the whole thing's just one big unpleasant hassle isn't it? Because we all know that, whether you're doing 80 or 90, or 100, or 70, you're more or less going to arrive where you're going at more or less the same time. Because we're not talking interstellar distances here. It's not like you're going to get to Mars a week earlier. It all evens out. Sometimes you're just accelerating, really fast, onto the back of the next traffic jam. At which point, you can change modes and start swapping lanes and cutting people up.

So. Where does it leave us? Just as the deregulation of broadcast has left us without Doctor Who on Saturday tea time, the ongoing privatisation of transport has seen the shutters go down and the blinkers go on. We live without any hope of whole-family-round-the-TV togetherness, instead with lower and lower common denominator, trash TV, and without that sense of occasion at Christmas, when you'd have Big Films on TV at Christmas and Morecambe and Wise and all that. Every time I see the front foglight fucker, or the blue-dazzle headlight shitbird, or the lane-swapping wanker, or the aggressive, tailgating tosspot, I'm reminded that Thatcherism has led us to this, and I'm depressed to my soul.