Lots of stories in the news today and yesterday about Michelle Kelly, the aggrieved learner driver who failed her test for “splashing” a pedestrian who was waiting at a bus stop.
No-one seems to know how much water was flung over the poor man; Ms. Kelly says that he wasn’t “deluged” but doesn’t seem to rule out any less than Biblical flooding. The general tone of media comment seems to be along the political-correctness-gone-mad lines, with a murmur of dissent from readers of the Manchester Evening News, who have probably waited at a wet bus stop or two themselves.
Of course, most of us sympathize with Ms. Kelly to quite an extent. Driving tests are horrible experiences from every point of view (I had to be prescribed tranquillizers in order finally to get through mine) and it’s no fun at all to sit in the driver’s seat looking at the back of the examiner’s clipboard while he sighs and says, “I’m sorry to inform you….” But for almost all drivers, the way they conduct themselves on their test is the pinnacle of their careful and considerate driving – once the L plates get torn up, so do lots of shibboleths about mirror-signal-manoeuvre, keeping within the speed limit, checking for cyclists on your inside as you turn left, indicating what you’re planning to do on a roundabout and generally doing-as-you-would-be-done-by. If drenching bystanders is considered acceptable during a driving test, it shows that there can be nothing wrong about it whatsoever in ‘real life’.
I haven’t done any extensive research on this, but suspect that most people who walk or cycle anywhere find that they are getting showered more violently and more often by traffic than used to be the case. There may be a couple of physical reasons for this – cars are larger and heavier than they used to be, and with more extreme weather patterns and building on flood plains, there may well be bigger and deeper puddles at the edges of the roads. But more significant, I think, is the fact that so many drivers never walk anywhere and have forgotten, if they ever knew, what it is really like to be “splashed”. Whereas in the past the driver knew that she might well be in the pedestrian’s position tomorrow, now anyone walking is a member of an aberrant sub-species. I wonder whether it’s partly an age thing. Michelle Kelly is 31; I am 43. It’s only half a generation, but the shift in car ownership and usage between the mid 1960s and the late 1970s is enormous. For my contemporaries in early childhood, the family might have owned a car, but it would have been the father’s domain, used for work and significant outings, never for the school run. Our daily travel; to playgroup, school, the shops, was first on foot with our mothers. And the fathers driving to and from work recognized our situation and would, on the whole, no sooner drench us than they would their own families. Of course accidents, and even the odd deliberate devilry, occurred, and could be funny, but the humour came from the taboo involved. There can be nothing particularly amusing about doing something so unremarkable as Ms. Kelly sees her action.
The other week I was walking into town one morning, and, looking the other way, was covered from head to foot with a burst of very cold, very abundant water. On the side of me nearest to the road, I was as wet as I had been the evening before when I deliberately fell out of a canoe into the lake (but that’s another story). If I’d been a young child, an elderly person, or vulnerable in any other way, the shock and physical effects could have been quite nasty. That was a particularly dramatic instance, but not unusual, as anyone who walks or cycles in Britain or Ireland can testify.
It’s also the case, at least round here, that drivers speed up during wet weather rather than slow down. Their response to any kind of hazard: bad weather, roadworks, a cyclist, seems to be to try to get past it as quickly as possible. It’s as though the whole experience of driving is a kind of virtual reality computer game. The Daily Mail’s article ends with Ms. Kelly’s aggrieved comment that she was feeling “really confident”. How dare the kill-joy examiner puncture such self-esteem with boring concepts of courtesy and consideration? You don’t get any points for those.
