Our old friends at pet-foods-to-driver-safety-nannying conglomerate IAMs have been bothering the media again with their usual nonsense about cars not being safe and people having to waste time and money refining their natural and healthy driving instincts.
IAMs have put out a press release revealing that Britian’s worst speeders (or spiders as they say on the continent) have been clocked doing a supposedly shocking 146mph on the M25 (one anticlockwise near Clacket Lane and one cockwise at Swanley). In Bankstone News’ book, anyone who manages over 50 on the perennially clogged ‘London Orbital’ deserves a medal not a reprimand.
Meanwhile, IAMs note, the record for breaking the speed limit by the most impressive margin goes to unknown of East Grinstead, who achieved an “astonishing” 128mph on London Road in a 30mph zone, an effort that came within a tantalising 2mph of going a full ton over the limit.
In a grotesque slur upon the skills of Britain’s speed fiends, IAMs’ CEO Sarah Slithers claimed that “At speeds of 140mph an individual is travelling at nearly two-and-a-half miles a minute. At that speed, it is simply impossible to react to anything that might happen in front of you.” This is patently untrue. However fast they were going, a driver would surely have time to react with a “Whaarg!” or a “Nooooo!” or something of that nature.
And, in any case, the speeds revealed by IAMs (the outcome of a Femdom of Information request to top cops around the country) are trifling compared with those recorded in other territories around the globe, suggesting that, far from being a bunch of reckless idiots, as IAMs would have us believe, British drivers are in fact the very model of moderation and restraint.
Why, only last night, Bankstone News was roused around 2am, by unusually noisy and proximate rodent activity, from a happily drooling reverie, snugly nestled amidst beer cans and crisp packets on the office couch, to hear some foreign bird on the all-night TV news declaring that a dozen or so chaps from Hong Kong have just had their wrists slapped by the Chinese authorities for driving at 275 kmph (170mph) on the highway from Shenzhen towards Guangzhou.
The straight-laced Commies apparently deemed this excessive, but the Kongers had what sounds to BN like a pretty much cast-iron excuse. Some bloke called Chan declared disarmingly that he and his friends “couldn’t help speeding, as the highway is so flat, wide and straight.”
Fair point, surely!
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