Note the date of this article. It has nothing to do with the 2022 strikes.
Over the last few weeks there have been reports that Royal Mail staff are threatening to go on strike over Christmas. There is one burning question in my mind on this if they do strike.
How would anyone bloody know?
Back in September, I purchased something from a seller on Amazon. It wasn’t fulfilled directly by Amazon, and the seller sent me emails with a delivery window. When the item didn’t arrive, they quickly sent me another, which arrived promptly. I told them I’d let them know if the first package arrived, but it never did.
We’re now well into November, and last week I got a card through my door telling me the Royal Mail had a delivery for me, but that it needed outstanding postage paying on it before they’d bring it. I had several parcels expected, so I paid the outstanding amount – a couple of quid – and waited to see who it was who’d messed up so I could claim it back from them (when you order through PayPal and Amazon, you have no worries on that score).
The delivery date Royal Mail had given me was a day last week, but by the day before that all the stuff I’d been expecting had arrived, and there was no indication or reference number that suggested any of those were involved. I was wondering what the hell it could be – I’d forgotten about the lost September delivery.
Come Saturday – and you can probably guess what’s coming – the September package was delivered! It was clearly dated September, but it had taken them until November to action it. A total of 50 days. I informed the Amazon seller, and they kindly told me to keep the second item as a goodwill gesture (so I got a spare of something I will almost certainly buy again at some point for a couple of quid when it normally costs ten times more).
But that’s not the point. The Royal Mail is likely to be hit by strikes for more pay by the arseholes responsible for things like this.
Items go missing on a fairly regular basis for me – I can count on a few a year for sure – and when I contact sellers it is always Royal Mail deliveries involved, and never couriers. You can be sure that I make my views on the Royal Mail well known at that point. What really bugs me, though, is the thought that at this time of year they take on a lot of temporary staff, many of whom couldn’t get jobs anywhere else, and with the occasional stories in the press where individuals have been either stealing or binning the post instead of delivering it… well, you have to wonder.
Then there was that time they suspended all deliveries on my road for a fortnight because a dog inside a house had barked at a postman (we’d assumed he’d been mauled and lost an arm or something until we spoke with the owner). The whole bloody street. We had to collect our mail from the sorting office. And what was funny was that the majority of the houses in the exclusion zone were further away from the one with the dog than all the ones round the back. It wouldn’t have surprised me to discover they’d also forbidden staff to even drive down the road.
Yes, it’s real. It hasn’t been Photoshopped or anything (unless Derbyshire Police are making stuff up), but this is what they found when they stopped a driver doing the school run near Normanton. It appeared on the BBC local newsfeed, so there’s no stable link, but the brief text with it says:
The officer gained the driver’s attention and escorted the car to a nearby garage in Normanton for a replacement tyre.
Derby City Council [DCC] said checks on the car found it was fully taxed and had a valid MOT.
Erm, excuse me, DCC, but the Highway Code says the following:
Tyres. Tyres MUST be correctly inflated to the vehicle manufacturer’s specification for the load being carried. Always refer to the vehicle’s handbook or data. Tyres should also be free from certain cuts and other defects.
Law CUR reg 27
Following the Law link to The Road Vehicles (Construction and Use) Regulations 1986, we see:
Condition and maintenance of tyres
27 …a wheeled motor vehicle or trailer a wheel of which is fitted with a pneumatic tyre shall not be used on a road, if—
… the tyre has any lump, bulge or tear caused by separation or partial failure of its structure
I think it is fairly safe to say that the tyre in the photo is absolutely, totally, and unequivocally illegal for use on the roads. Illegal with knobs on. It’s worth at least six points on someone’s licence in that state.
It’s yet another example of the Police not doing their jobs properly. If a male driver had, say, tried to chat up a woman as he engaged in “the school run”, he’d be in the cells and looking at lifelong membership of the sex offenders’ register before you could fart. However, someone “else” on “the school run” has got away with this unbelievably dangerous tyre. And he/she (take a guess which it most likely was) probably had his/her kids with him/her at some point (not to mention everyone else’s kids who had to risk being within five miles of him/her).
You need to be a special kind of stupid to let a tyre get in that condition. I’ve never seen one even remotely like it, and the wheel balance must have been beyond bad. And the driver in question seriously needs lesson in how not to hit the kerb every time they park, because as well as an horrendously dangerous car, they’re also clearly an horrendously bad driver (and don’t forget the month of rain we had this morning, either). But now we know you can get away with all that. In Derbyshire, anyway.
As usual, ADIs across the web forums and social media know more about the story than anyone else – even though they only just read it in the newspapers – and it has prompted the usual “ban the burkha” mob to mount their soapboxes once again now that Brexit has given them the necessary bravado.
The woman in question, Hatice Sadir, was Turkish. She spoke very little English, and had failed a test a few weeks previously. It appears that she paid someone £300 for a two-way bluetooth device including specially designed headscarf. She booked a test with voiceover through headphones, and this was therefore audible to whoever was on the other end of her two-way link, and they told her the answers as the questions were read out.
Test centre staff recognised her from her previous visit. They noted that she hadn’t worn a headscarf the first time and were suspicious at that, and the fact she finished the test very quickly – which they found unusual for someone with language difficulties.
You will note from the photograph of Sadir, apparently outside the court, that she appears very westernised. She has a tattoo on her arm in the fashionable mode. The fact that she is (probably) Muslim is irrelevant. However, in their versions of the story, The Sun and the Daily Mail have identified the “headscarf” as a “hijab”, as is their modus operandi these days.
Sadir, a mother of three, was just a very stupid woman who was desperate to get a licence. Her (probable) religion has nothing to do with it. The only thing I find annoying is that she got a suspended 20 month prison sentence, when she refused to identify whoever it was who was providing the service she paid for. It ought to have been 20 months in custody just for that.
This is the kind of thing you have to deal with when you’re driving on Britain’s roads these days. Complete wankers like the driver of this white Mercedes, registration number KL68 TLY.
This was on a 50mph road, with me driving (at 50mph), and there was no one behind me.
If Nottinghamshire Police had managed to at least drag themselves into the latter part of the 20th century, I’d be able to upload this for them to deal with. But no. The only way of even informing them of it is to send my memory card in its entirety, with zero chance of getting it back, and even less chance of them following up on the situation anyway. And that’s coming from someone who has a lot of respect for the police.
It is clearly a precondition to owning a BMW, Audi, or Mercedes that you have to be a certified f***ing twat, with no discernible brain activity in the head area (it’s all concentrated in the groin, of course). Their behaviour happens too often and too consistently to be a coincidence.
I didn’t have my dash cam on because I’d just been to the hand car wash, so I couldn’t catch the idiot on film, but driving past Chilwell Golf Club – at the traffic lights – there was a lorry, then me, then this f***ing halfwit in the silver BMW M240i (FE17 DKF) racing up at speed. The lights were on green, the lorry and me were moving, and twat boy decided he would still go for the overtake. He misjudged everything, and ended up slamming his brakes on and forcing his way between the lorry and me. There was no one behind me at all, so the manoeuvre was as pointless as it was dangerous.
It’s wan*ers like this who are directly responsible for the daily incidents involving injuries and death on the motorways and trunk roads. It was an oldish-looking guy, bald head, and the fact that he was in an automatic in the first place suggests his mental faculties were such that he ought not to be trying stunts like this.
If the police are interested – and they should be, although they probably won’t – he appears to live in the Rylands, since that’s where he turned off (ironically, he was stuck at red lights as I went by).
On the subject of arsehole drivers, I saw on the local newsfeed yesterday that drivers in Leicestershire were being advised to stay away from the notorious Watery Gate ford at Thurlaston. Water levels were already high, and were expected to rise further with overnight rain. They did, and the level gauge shows that there was 1 metre depth of water for about 40 metres of road to drive through (if you were stupid enough to try in anything other than an off-road vehicle).
Cue: a Mercedes driver, who was stupid enough to try.
They had to get a fire engine and a dinghy out to rescue the prat, and there’s an ambulance because he or she is probably “traumatised”. The poor dear. Note how the water is over half way up his doors!
They should have their licence taken away permanently for something like this. Or at least be charged for the emergency service call out.
I take most of my pupils through the ford on Beanford Lane near Oxton at some point during their lessons. Most haven’t a clue what the “FORD” sign means in the Highway Code – even if they’ve ever seen it. Almost no one knows what a ford is in the first place, these days. The Bean ford isn’t very wide, whereas Watery Gate is.
But I won’t go through it if it’s been raining hard, and I stop or slow down to assess the depth using the level gauge before I do. Attempting to take on a metre depth of water in a normal car is unbelievably stupid, especially over such a long distance.
All we need now is for the policy to be extended to everywhere else in the country, and maybe – just maybe – these little pricks might start to wonder if it’s really worth it.
Mind you, if I was going to put any money on it, I suspect the Met will come under pressure to stop doing it, especially if one of the little darlings gets hurt.
This made me smile. An 18-year old kid in Germany passed his driving test, then got caught by police with a radar gun doing 60mph in a 30mph zone on his way home (with four of his mates in the car). This happened 49 minutes after his test pass.
He’s got an automatic four-week ban, and will have to take further “expensive” training. He also got two points on his licence, a €200 fine, and his two-year new-driver probationary period has been extended to four.
You know how I’m always going on about the prats I have share this planet with? How about this one?
He goes into a garage and tries to put £10 of fuel in his car. He overshoots by 3p, but he doesn’t want to break into another note, and the garage won’t let him off the 3p (he’s actually got the money, remember). So what does he do? He phones the Police on 999.
Better still is the fact that he’s now gone on to Reddit to ask how he can get the Police to remove the video because it’s gone sort of semi-viral. As you can imagine, he doesn’t have much support (incidentally, to some of the smart arses on Reddit, that doesn’t sound like a Nottingham accent – more like a Derby one).
I was on a lesson with a pupil recently, and we were driving from Chilwell through Long Eaton. It was busy, and traffic was queuing in both lanes for both of the roundabouts in the town centre.
My usual mantra to pupils is “stay in the left hand lane unless you know what you are doing”, and you’ll see why when you read on. In this case, just before the first roundabout in Long Eaton, there was an HGV waiting to turn left towards the Tesco store at the 1st exit. The exit was backed up with cars – presumably heading for Tesco – and on the 2nd exit (our destination) I could see there were two stopped buses, one of which was blocking the entire left lane. Beyond the second roundabout at its 2nd exit there were two lanes of queuing traffic merging into a single lane.
I saw all this in advance, mentioned it to my pupil, and instructed her to negotiate both roundabouts in the right-hand lane.
Once we had got through the roundabouts (see top picture), we approached the merge into single lane. We were alternately stopping and moving, and kept pulling alongside another car (the yellow one in the picture, above). As we came to the merge, I instructed my pupil to keep up with that car, but to let it go ahead of us, and we would merge behind it. I explained about merging in turn and not trying to cut other people up by being greedy.
Now, you’d think everything would have been all right. I mean, traffic going nowhere in a hurry, we were actually in the process of merging, with no intention of trying to cut anyone up, just dealing with the road conditions in the safest and most sensible way possible…
Except as we started to merge, a prat in a silver Corsa (what else?) came up alongside us – eyes staring straight forward, because that makes everything all right, of course – and forced her way in. You can see from the third picture what she did.
She had come around the roundabout some considerable time after us, and judging by her apparent age, the ink was probably still damp on her licence. It was absolutely clear what she was thinking and intending to do – and it wasn’t to allow us to complete the merge.
She had all the finger actions down to a ‘T’ when I turned to look at her. I rolled down my window and asked if she’d ever heard of “merge in turn”, and elicited some more finger gestures. She then accelerated forwards and tailgated the yellow car just to be doubly sure that she “won”. A typical chav.
Silver Corsa, registration S900 CJA
She knew exactly what she was doing right from the start.
To make matters worse, an arsehole of a cyclist who was alongside commented “she had the right of way, mate” as he passed (I don’t think I really need to say much about cyclists and their understanding of the Highway Code). No. She. Didn’t. Not at that point, and under those circumstances. She was forcing her way in in a situation where she shouldn’t have. There was only one lane at that point, and my pupil was at least six car lengths past the end of the two-lane section.
The Highway Code recommends merging in turn in precisely these situations. It’s in Rule 134 if the chav or that smart-ass cyclist is reading this. It only advises against merging in turn at high speeds, because it would be dangerous.
Of course, my pupil was not in the wrong because she didn’t force her way in and wasn’t trying to do so. We were already in the only lane available at that point, and were moving in slow traffic. Right of way didn’t enter into it – other than that we already had it.
Rule 144 of the Highway Code refers to driving without due care and attention. This rule was rewritten not long ago to include more detail about what is acceptable and what isn’t, and I doubt that most road users (and especially chavs) can even remember what was in the older version, let alone this one (most cyclists are probably unaware that there’s even a Highway Code). And earlier this year, the RAC wrote an article, titled Driving without due care and attention – are you an offender? In it, they say:
The offence of driving without due care and attention – also referred to as careless driving – covers a multitude of motoring sins, from tailgating to tuning the radio…
Driving without due care and attention is not necessarily a ‘clear cut’ offence…
What comes under this offence..?
Examples of disregard for other road users may include [list shortened]:
Driving aggressively
Overtaking on the left-hand side
Not giving way where appropriate
Rule 217 also has something interesting to say about behaving like a prat around other road users:
Rule 217
Learners and inexperienced drivers. They may not be so skilful at anticipating and responding to events. Be particularly patient with learner drivers and young drivers. Drivers who have recently passed their test may display a ‘new driver’ plate or sticker (see ‘Safety code for new drivers’).
Some people manage to tick all the boxes in one go, and those who are really into ‘P’ plate territory themselves are often the worst. I feel a proper article on merging coming on.
Note the date of this article. It has nothing to do with the 2022 strikes.
Look at the photo, above.
There was a story in the 
This made me smile. An 
