{"id":18609,"date":"2015-11-05T21:00:58","date_gmt":"2015-11-05T21:00:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=18609"},"modified":"2015-11-05T21:00:58","modified_gmt":"2015-11-05T21:00:58","slug":"is-it-really-ageism-part-ii","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/?p=18609","title":{"rendered":"Is it Really Ageism: Part II"},"content":{"rendered":"

A few days ago I wrote about how a 98-year old man had been quoted \u00a320,000<\/a> to renew his car insurance. The do-good organisations are naturally up in arms over it, suggesting that he should be allowed to drive without any restrictions. I also pointed out how there was recently a fatal crash in Nottinghamshire after an 87-year old managed to get on the wrong side of the M1 at 2am one morning and collided with a van, killing himself and the passenger in the van.\"Elderly<\/p>\n

Then this story came in on the newsfeeds<\/a>. In this case, 82-year old Sheila Fitzgerald set out on a 4 mile journey from Ormskirk to Rainford, in Merseyside, in foggy conditions. She was reported missing, and was found six hours later by police 50 miles away in Gisburn. She apparently \u201ctook a wrong turning in the fog and became confused\u201d.<\/p>\n

Once we\u2019re through with the Mail\u2019s saccharin-sweet appraisal of the \u201cextraordinary journey\u201d, it is worth noting that in her \u201cconfusion\u201d Mrs Fitzgerald had accidentally driven on to the M58, then the M6, then the M65, then the M6 again, before finally getting on to the A59 and travelling in exactly the opposite direction to her home location for about 25 miles. She didn\u2019t have a bloody clue where she was! The entire journey would have taken about an hour \u2013 maybe an hour and half allowing for the weather \u2013 with an average driver. Mrs Fitzgerald took six hours, remember, and yet when questioned she believed she\u2019d only \u201cbeen driving for about 20 minutes\u201d and was \u201cjust finding her way home\u201d.<\/p>\n

Thinking back to the 87-year old and his innocent victim who were killed after driving the wrong way up the M1, you can only shudder to think at what could have happened if fate had been less kind to Mrs Fitzgerald and all those other drivers on the Merseyside motorways that foggy night.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

A few days ago I wrote about how a 98-year old man had been quoted \u00a320,000 to renew his car insurance. The do-good organisations are naturally up in arms over it, suggesting that he should be allowed to drive without any restrictions. I also pointed out how there was recently a fatal crash in Nottinghamshire […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[80,86,87],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-18609","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-adi-related","category-bad-drivers","category-news"],"aioseo_notices":[],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18609","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=18609"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/18609\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=18609"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=18609"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/diaryofanadi.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=18609"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}