Well, the memory of the Duke of Edinburgh’s recent
traffic accident, which was top of the news for quite a while, has now faded
away. As he had handed in his driving
licence, the police decided not to proceed further and my suggestion for a new
road sign in Norfolk is now redundant.
I was going to submit a design for a new warning sign: a
white triangle with a red border and a picture of a black bowler hat
inside. Underneath would be a notice on
the lines of:
Caution!
Duke’s Crossing
ahead
Please drive very
slowly and with extreme care for the next 500 yards.
Every year many drivers decide (due to illness, an
accident or a bad scare on the road) to hand in their licence and sell their
car. Many of them live in remote areas
of the country.
Little by little they become very restricted and have to ask
Angels, as their neighbours
become, to help them to get around.
The Duke of Edinburgh is a very lucky chap and I wonder
if he realises just how lucky he is. If
he decides he wants to pop into town, he has got a whole team of people on
hand, any one of whom will drive him in and wait until he is ready to come
back. So, he can easily nip into the
Post Office for some stamps and notecards, then to the greengrocer for a bag of
apples, and, finally to the Market-Place Café for a pot of tea, an iced bun and
a long chat with whoever is in that afternoon to catch up on all the
gossip. Then, when he wants to go home,
a lift straight back and no need to apologise for taking so long or feeling
beholden to the driver for his or her kindness that day.
It is amazing how news items suddenly get everybody all
in a lather and then vanish without trace, but the underlying story has often
not gone away and (not the Duke of Edinburgh of course) many riders and drivers
who were formerly fully independent and mobile, living in remote areas, have to
face up to a whole raft of difficulties and expense in getting around.
There are numerous ways to help these people and it is a
shame that the Duke of Edinburgh has now retired from public life as he would
be well suited to spearhead some form of action to help many more of these
disadvantaged and often isolated one-time drivers.
However, if the driver lives fairly close to the edge of
a village or town, there is a solution.
This is the MOBILITY SCOOTER to
get around and about.
These devices come in all shapes and sizes with varying
speed levels and manoeuvrability. They
can be driven without need of a licence or medical check. Some will be seen pottering gently along the
pavement and pedestrians can easily avoid these scooters. But some drivers will tear around as if they
were the only person on the pavement. Many
people can say that they have had to skip aside pretty smartly when a mobility
scooter has careered around a corner in front of them speeding along the pavement. We do not need any more legislation, there
are enough laws already, but we need to slow some of these scooters down a bit! Also, some of the drivers may be a bit
ambitious, expecting their scooter to do more than it is capable of: entering
some shops can be difficult if the scooter wheels are too small for the
threshold and driving into the countryside could be problematical if your
wheels sink into the ground and you have to be pulled free.
Where we used to live, in St Albans, we knew a
couple of disabled ladies who each had a pretty powerful mobility scooter. Returning from town, they would pass in front
of our house and then spin round a corner to go up to their home. Their little dog would sit in the handlebar
basket of the lead scooter, front paws on the basket and ears waggling. At this particular corner, there was a dip in
the pavement and if you hit this at high speed - and these ladies always did –
the scooter would bounce and their dog would fly up. He was airborne! He was flying! Waggly ears flapping in the breeze. Did he love it? You bet he did!
