Set Your Spirit Free (It's the only way to be)

I don't know whether this is just a Nottingham thing, but we seem to have loads of roads where you come across a roundabout/some traffic lights with 2 lanes, and then within about 10m this merges into 1 lane. I would dearly love to know what the thinking is behind this road layout, because it seems to me that it does very little but cause trouble. In an ideal world I imagine that there would be no problem, and traffic would just slot into the one lane in a neat and orderly fashion. No worries. Unfortunately, human nature doesn't work like that. There are people who will take the outside lane at every opportunity because they see it as an opportunity to get ahead. In queues of traffic, this just leads to everyone in the left-hand lane waiting even longer as people push up the outside lane and then pushing in (this happens when they shut a lane on a motorway as well).

You might be wondering why I'm feeling the need to rant about this. Well, yesterday afternoon on the way home, I was amused / appalled by one particular instance of this. Amused because it was some sort of Winnebago affair with a trailer attached that was doing all the overtaking (a Winnebago, for heaven's sake!). Appalled because he was driving so badly in such a ridiculous vehicle - swerving out wildly past cars, but making no particular progress on a busy-ish road. At one point this guy had zoomed past a car, then as the lane narrowed into one, had pulled back in so sharply that the driver of the car behind will have had the awful sight of the Winnebago directly in front of him and the trailer the Winnebago was towing sitting alongside him.... not what you want to see on a quiet Sunday afternoon drive. I imagine it blacked out the light.

Anyway - the driver of the Winnebago is a member of the British Windsurfing team and has his web address plastered all over his vehicle. If you've ever been cut up by one of these idiots, If you have a spare moment feel free to send him some abuse.

Rich Potter - windsurfer and terrible driver

ST [via email]