The builder boyfriend returned from a trip to London to inform me he was being done for speeding at 32mph, for crying out loud.
He was flashed by a camera crawling uphill in a 30 zone going through the almost middle-of-nowhere in the Ashdown Forest, on his way to visit his sister in Sussex for the weekend. A few weeks after I completed a speed awareness course for doing an improbably incorrect 40mph on a dual carriageway during a trip to see my parents in Coventry, we were going round the same rigmarole with him.
He showed me his letter from the Sussex Police on his return to Ireland. It was slightly less obnoxious than the one from West Midlands Police, but it amounted to the same thing: a £100 fine, sorry speed course. This means the cost of the driving penalties to visit the UK is more than twice the cost of the flights.
I know the spot where he got done, and it is nigh-on impossible to get up this steep hill at less than 30 near the very top without either stalling, changing down so suddenly you wreck your gearbox, or by putting your foot down very slightly. He didn’t manage it. He went 2mph over. It’s not about making people drive safely, it’s about challenging them to deploy the mental and physical agility to hit the exact number on the speedometer they say you have to hit, at the exact point you have to hit it, which makes British driving more like taking part in the Krypton Factor, if you remember that.
Why don’t the police make drivers get out of their cars at random roadblocks to climb a frame, swing from a rope, land on a bar, walk across the bar, jump into a pit of mud and crawl through the mud beneath a net to emerge at the other end by a certain time, then run back to their car, jump in and proceed on their way when a drill sergeant waves a flag at them?
A speed trap – aptly named – is designed to make you fail.
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