This story contains a video taken at the weekend, and it shows a woman driving the wrong way on the A11 near Cambridge. Since it’s on YouTube, I’ve embedded it here.
I’m sure that there will be more about it shortly, but the story simply says that the police took her home, and seized her car. No mention of age or other circumstances, though the car is a typical “old people” wagon.
Another story came in on the newsfeeds at the same time. It tells how in two separate “wrong-way” incidents in the USA, eleven people died. I would hope that the fact that this stupid woman in Cambridge didn’t kill anyone doesn’t prevent her from being prosecuted to the fullest extent, and having her licence taken away permanently. People like her shouldn’t be allowed out alone, let alone hold driving licences.
Edit: Here we go. It’s just as I said. Sky News reports that it was “an elderly woman”. Worryingly, the police have said that they will not be pressing charges because:
…it isn’t in the public interest due to health issues…
I would have thought that makes it very much a public interest issue. Fair dues, though. The police have seized her car and are liaising with the DVLA to have her licence revoked. Permanently, I hope.
Well done Harry, who passed today with just two driver faults. It was especially good considering that the heavens opened half way through his test, and he had to complete it in very poor conditions. I was annoyed to see that he also nearly had to contend with one of the local idiots who pass themselves off as ADIs driving into the test centre to “practice” bay parking shortly before the other candidates started arriving back.
As I’ve said before, there are at least eight car parks I use for this manoeuvre on lessons, never getting in anyone’s way – and finding somewhere else if another instructor is already there. It’s a shame for this business that these morons manage to keep hold of their green badges, as they repeatedly attempt to screw up other peoples tests and ignore the test centre manager’s frequent polite requests to piss off somewhere else.
Back to the subject, though, it was also nice to have someone who was genuinely pleased with his pass certificate as we drove back home.
Two unrelated stories from America showing two sides to human nature. The first is quite amusing, and tells how a woman, Denise Rebelato, arriving at JFK Airport took a taxi to her Boston home and racked up a $980 fare (that’s about £600) for the 200 mile journey – which she couldn’t afford to pay. She could have taken a bus for $35. According to the story, she sounds like a right fruitcake.
The second story is quite heart-warming. A man identified only as “James” was involved in a motor accident, for which he received a ticket. In order to attend court over the matter, and since his car had been written-off in the accident, he left his shelter (he’s homeless) at 1am in sub-zero temperatures (it was –10, and since we’re talking about the USA, that must be –10 Fahrenheit – or -23°C in British money) in order to walk the 30 miles to the courthouse. A cop, Andy Blimline, who was at the courthouse couldn’t believe James had walked and paid his $80 taxi fare back to the shelter after the hearing. What a great guy.
This came through at the weekend, but the story is now being covered in more detail in the media. It tells how Martin Olujosun, 22, went berserk after he failed his test in Gillingham.
Olujosun initially claimed to have acted in self defence (or “defense” if you’re a Daily Mail hack with a poor command of English). He attacked examiner, Darral Gregory, who sustained a splintered bone in his shoulder. Olujosun threatened to find out where Gregory lived and kill him.
Initially, after learning that he’d failed, Olujosun tried to punch his examiner in the face. A scuffle ensued, which resulted in Gregory sustaining the damaged shoulder. The initial story at the weekend also mentioned that Olujosun attempted to play the race card. His defence had clearly been reading The Big Book Of Stupid Language when offering mitigation:
He regrets it. If you held a gun to his head he can’t tell you why, he just lost it, he’d just lost his mother.
Well, obviously that makes it all right, then. Incredibly, Olujosun was not jailed, but received an 18-month suspended sentence – once again proving that UK Law is a complete ass.
The Belper News reports that Gareth Warne, 32, was banned for 12 months last October for drink-driving. He was then spotted driving a BMW by police, who confirmed he was a banned driver. That means he was also driving without insurance. He pleaded guilty to both charges.
His defence was obviously completely out of ideas and offered the following pathetic mitigation:
…the former groundsman committed the offence when he had expected a lift to work but had been let down.
This was enough to fool the magistrates, who gave Warne a paltry 12 week prison sentence – and suspended it for 12 months.
Warne should have been put away for long enough for his stupidity to sink in. As it is, the extant stupidity of the magistrates is almost no punishment at all.
Unfortunately, I have no control over the specific ads which appear on the right of this blog. I can block an entire group (like pornography), but I can’t pick and choose individual adverts within a group which I allow. One advert in particular has just caught my eye.
Be aware that Direct Driving Tests.org is not an official DSA website, and they will almost certainly charge you extra for booking your test. I can’t say that you would end up losing your money if you used Direct Driving Tests.org, but there are plenty of others who deliberately make themselves look official and who would walk away with your money. If I could block this particular advert – which has plagiarised the old DSA arrow logo purposely to mislead people – I would. This outfit has been slammed by the ASA on previous occasions (they use various names to try and lure people in).
The only site you should use – unless you really want to spend more money than necessary and even risk not getting a test at all – is GOV.UK.
Your car theory test should cost £31, and your car practical test either £62 or £75 (depending on whether you do it on a weekday or a weekend). If any website charges a different amount, hit “cancel” immediately and use GOV.UK.
It would appear that Direct Driving Tests.org charges an additional £23 to book your practical test for you! You’d be far better off spending that on an extra lesson. And remember that if any company charges a similar additional fee for the theory test, you could get much better training materials for less than £5 on your smartphone and less than £8 for a DVD from Amazon.
You see, this winter has been really mild, which is in stark contrast to the last two or three, which have been very cold with a lot of snow. Until a couple of years ago, you had to go back to the 1980s to find a winter where snow even settled, let alone hung around for more than a few days, and before that it was the early 1970s. Then there were the summers. A few years ago we had one of the wettest on record, with huge downpours, thunderstorms, and localised flooding. Not long before that we had some very warm summers, but that didn’t stop the “scientists” telling us that that was the end of the sun for the next generation or so as recently as last spring, which started later than usual.
That’s right. We mustn’t forget that only last June the Met Office was telling us that there’d be no summers for at least a decade. Within a few weeks temperatures had soared, and in the end the Met Office statistics showed it to be the “warmest, driest, and sunniest summer since 2006”. In fact, the statistics don’t do it justice, because the warm weather ran all the way from June until at least September. I don’t think I actually slept under blankets for that entire period. Even now – in early 2014 – we’re effectively still experiencing the same heat wave – just turned down a few notches for the winter months.
The Met Office has a history of making highly inaccurate predictions. There was the legendary 1987 forecast, where Michael Fish said there wasn’t a hurricane on the way, but which saw the worst storm for 300 years pounding the South East, with record damage and 19 dead. The Met Office completely failed to predict the severity of that storm. Then there was the infamous “barbecue summer” forecast in 2009, where summer actually turned out to be one of the wettest on record. It was the third summer in succession where the Met Office had got it absolutely wrong, and as a result it no longer issues long range forecasts. And back then, they were blaming the El Nino Effect. No one predicted the late spring last year, nor did they predict the prolonged heat wave or the wet weather experienced so far this year. And don’t forget that as recently as April 2012 we were in a drought which was forecast to “last until Christmas” (it began in 2010).
So it came as a bit of a surprise that the Met Office has someone it refers to as a “chief scientist”, and who – in the face of the examples I gave above – can come out with nonsense like this:
Dame Julia Slingo [the alleged “chief scientist”] said the variable UK climate meant there was “no definitive answer” to what caused the storms.
“But all the evidence suggests there is a link to climate change,” she added.
“There is no evidence to counter the basic premise that a warmer world will lead to more intense daily and hourly rain events.”
It’s rubbish! Scientists cannot agree on what’s going on, and when you strip away the hype you’re just left with some weather. And by hype, I mean idiotic numbers like this:
More than 130 severe flood warnings – indicating a threat to life – have been issued since December. In contrast, there were only nine in the whole of 2012.
That is unscientific and meaningless. And in the story, Slingo says that the UK has seen the “most exceptional period of rainfall in 248 years”. Another useless statistic when you consider that the 1987 storm was the “worst for 300 years”.
In fact, it is quite easy to get hold of the raw data concerning rainfall since 1845 for the UK. And if you plot it on a graph, this is what you get. First of all, the winter rainfall expressed as a percentage of the mean for the entire period:
And this one is the summer rainfall expressed in the same way:
For the winter graph, the trend is virtually flat since 1909 (winters appear to have been very slightly drier on average before that). It’s only when you go back as far as 1865 that you can say the average rainfall for winter has increased. For the summer graph, the trend is slightly downwards all the way through (i.e. summers tend to be a bit drier now than they were at the turn of the 20th century).
To listen to Slingo and most other meteorologists, you’d be forgiven for thinking that there was a sharp upward trend. In fact, there is absolutely nothing of the sort. For every peak, there is an earlier and a later trough – but if you just focus on the last peak at any point in time you could fool yourself into arguing that the trend is upwards. I suspect this is what Slingo and other pseudo-scientists are very adept at doing, and they have the media to propagate their myths.
Another thing is that when you look at data by region, in any given year you might find one area (e.g. Wales) which has much more than the average rainfall, and yet in another area (e.g. Scotland or England) the rainfall is at or below the average. And if you go into even finer detail, and look at individual weather stations, you might find that over any given period one station has recorded a monsoon, whereas one a few tens of miles away has only picked up a fraction of the rainfall. Indeed, this dramatic variation occurs on all scales – town to town, country to country, and continent to continent.
No one is denying that the people in Somerset have got it rough at the moment (though they’d better prepare to slip into the background again, now that the Thames is flooding). But all you have to do is look at historical floods in the UK and you see that in spite of the rhetoric (“the worst in living memory”), there are various examples from the last century or so involving British cities and towns (and those are just the dramatic ones).
All of this convinces me that meteorology isn’t a science, since those who claim to be meteorologists certainly don’t seem to behave scientifically.
The idiots at the City Council have sanctioned road works on Mansfield Road – matrix signs have been proclaiming it for the last month or so. This is on top of the over-running tram works, and the pointless “improvements” to the ring road junctions on Middleton and Western boulevards. It is also on top of mounting additional road works to replace traffic lights, gas mains, electrical cabling, and water pipes at numerous locations. And on top of various restrictions due to building projects (e.g. on Wilford Lane). Clifton has got temporary lights up all over the place. It is impossible to move in Nottingham at the moment – although it’s been like this for almost two years, and is destined to stay that way for as long again.
It is not easy to find out much about the Mansfield Road work – its duration, for example. Nottingham City Council prints its own playing cards on these matters, and refuses to show them to anyone else.
Al I have found so far is this story in the Nottingham Evening Post from January this year. You may be surprised to discover that the work has nothing to do with improving the junction for motorists. It’s another asinine project aimed at cyclists. Yes, they are going to build a cycle path for cyclists to ignore, like they ignore all other cycle paths as it suits them.
And be warned that the same is earmarked for Dunkirk roundabout in the near future. Don’t be surprised if the work starts there during the current tram works, and before the Mansfield Road work is completed.
It comes as no surprise to see that Jane Urquhart is involved:
When told we could be provided the money to do more difficult projects at Mansfield Road and Dunkirk roundabout, we thought it was too good an opportunity to miss.
This woman is not of this world. She’s already shown her mettle (here and here), and with this utterance has confirmed her total disconnection with the real world – and the thousands of motorists who will be held up still further by the absolute travesty that is Nottingham. Urquhart and her cronies have destroyed this once fine city, and they are now just pissing on the rubble as they allow more and more road works to commence.
Until I find a definitive answer, you can be certain that for the amount of money involved – and the level of incompetence being wielded by Nottingham City Council – the disruption will last for at least two months.
No one can possibly be unaware of the damage caused by the succession of recent storms, particularly in the south of the country. The government has been criticised for not doing enough, though I’m not sure what anyone could do against the forces of nature involved (solid concrete sea walls have been washed away).
But this BBC report highlights very well the sort of misdirected concern that thousands of people are up in arms about. The reporter just rattles on and on about the railway line without even the briefest mention of the risk to the houses along that seafront in Dawlish, Devon.
All of those houses are at risk of falling into the sea. No one can live in them with that sort of damage. Sod the railway line – the houses are far more important. And yet not one word… just the railway.
(Note: One day later, the BBC has apparently seen sense – maybe they read this – and has deigned to mention the people, even though it is still prattling about the bloody train).
…ensure that the test was carried out fairly and an unsuccessful outcome was the correct decision.
This bunch appears to have ideas well above its station. It is implying that tests are NOT carried out fairly, and that the examiners’ decisions are NOT correct. It is also worth noting that PoliceWitness sells dash-cams – though I’m sure this has absolutely nothing to do with it at all!
PoliceWitness appears to be an online version of the Neighbourhood Watch. On its FAQ page it says:
We are not the Police, we do not answer to the Police, we only answer to you. No politics, no bureaucracy, no red (blue) tape! We help ensure the things that are important to you are dealt with in a way that you want.
In fact, the advice might actually be illegal. Most test centres have a notice posted warning that recording of tests is not allowed. PoliceWitness is getting itself into a very muddy area, since unless an examiner gives permission such recording could be a breach of the Data Protection Act. Again, on its website, PoliceWitness says:
Can I legally film someone in a public place, even without their consent or knowledge?
Yes, most definitely. Think about the thousands of CCTV cameras in our town centres, a news crew capturing a feature, or indeed the paparazzi who chase and ‘snap’ celebrities. Anyone in a public place can be captured legitimately.
There are always exceptions, one being footage that maybe used for the purposes of committing terrorism, and another is focusing on an individual persistently, without their consent, which may constitute the criminal offence of harassment. The filming of children may also constitute a criminal offence.
Capturing video evidence from your car is perfectly legal, as is standing by the roadside and filming as the world goes by!
The inside of the car during a driving test is NOT a “public place”, so PoliceWitness is talking bollocks. Filming is even more of a problem when it has been specifically forbidden, and the warning given that if a recording device is discovered during a test then the test will be terminated.
The simple fact is that in 99.9% of all driving tests, the outcome is fair and correct. It matters little that candidates or instructors disagree.
As for driving instructors like the one in the article claiming it would help them teach their pupils, that’s more bollocks. If you do your job properly you don’t need to see a video of the test – in any case, you can sit in the back if you’re that desperate to nit-pick what the examiner does. Pupils fail because they make mistakes, even when they can actually drive quite well. Live with it.
As of September 2014 there are rumours that the DVSA has reviewed its stance on cameras (though NOT to allow tests to be recorded). I haven’t seen anything official and will hold off commenting until I do.
Well done Harry, who passed today with just two driver faults. It was especially good considering that the heavens opened half way through his test, and he had to complete it in very poor conditions. I was annoyed to see that he also nearly had to contend with one of the local idiots who pass themselves off as ADIs driving into the test centre to “practice” bay parking shortly before the other candidates started arriving back.
