I guess it’s worth posting now in order to remind me that I shouldn’t listen to everything I’m told, especially when it’s a machine…

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Today, through blind acceptance of technology, incomplete Italian road-signs and my own indecision, I nearly killed myself, my wife, possibly other road-users and made my children into orphans. I say this without exaggerating.

We are most of the way through an Italian road-trip, taking us from Pisa, down to Naples (stinky and dirty), across to Bari and back up the Adriatic coast to Pescara, across to Parma and back to Lyon.

Having just arrived in Bari, and renting a cottage on a farm, we decided to leave the kids unattended while we went to the supermarket to stock up. The SatNav (TomTom) told us that it was a 15 minute drive away; it was still light, 7PM, so we weren’t too worried about leaving them (they are 12 and 10).

Sean, with the lilting Irish accent had been our SatNav companion (“turn roight, won’t ye”), and until now had served us well. It has taken me over a year to convince my wife that a SatNav is not merely a toy-for-the-boys and is indispensable, and she was just coming round to my way of thinking as he had got us through some difficult places without problems. Over time, I’ve got used to the phrases used by TomTom, knowing that “Exit Ahead” means in 2KM, and not 20 metres, but, as we arrived at the entrance to the dual-carriageway, I was puzzled by, “Turn Right, then bear left”. I turned right, as directed, then, confused by the on-screen map, the instructions and the road signs (lack thereof), I immediately came across a fork which seemed to offer me the possibility of choosing left or right. I was sure that “Bear Left” didn’t mean immediately, but it seemed clear that this was what I needed to do. A snap decision and I took the left fork. The road took us downwards, looping sharply to the left. This seemed normal to me, but my wife said that she thought that we should have “bore left”, further along the road. Committed, I carried on, and after entering onto the dual carriageway, she said (calmly, I thought) that we were on the wrong side of the road. It took me 100m and a lifetime, before I panicked, (“shit, shit, shit, we are going the wrong way”). Cars were coming towards us at great speed, luckily for us, still a few 100 metres away. Not knowing what to do, I put on the hazard lights, and tried to do a U-turn on the dual carriageway. We were in a hire car, and the reverse gear was not in the same place as on my own car, so, of course, in my panic, I stalled it (‘shit, shit, shit”, “keep calm”). Cars started passing us, slowing down, flashing their lights and blowing their horns. Luckily, there was a hard-shoulder & I managed to get the car turned round as a pile of cars was now stopped in front of us. I drove off the motorway at the exit which I had just treated as an entry and carried on our way to the supermarket, not speaking much about the event.

It was only when we walking around the supermarket isles that the potential consequences kicked in: death, destruction, our kids, alone on the campsite, wondering, as it got darker, where mum & dad were and whether they should tell somebody, even though they didn’t speak the language. This left me shaking and distracted for quite some time afterwards, as I’m sure you can imagine.

Later, after we got back to the campsite, I ran the event through my mind, wondering just how I managed to make such a mistake. Next time we drove past the entranceexit, I took a photo so that I could study.

Bear left (but not just yet, you fool)

The photo you see here was taken just after the “bear right” part of Sean’s instructions, and therefore the “bear left” part is still to be acted upon. As you can see from the photo, a car is clearly coming off the motorway sliproad – if the car had been coming off the motorway at the time I made the mistake, I obviously wouldn’t have “borne left”. But imagine I’d gone left a few seconds earlier as this car was coming round the blind corner further down the slip-road…all of us would be dead I reckon. Looking at the picture, and comparing it with other motorway sliproads, the difference that I think threw me is the lack of a “No Entry” sign warning me not to go left. With the arrow pointing to the right, and the car in the picture, it is fairly obvious, but in the different circumtances, believe me, the mistake was easy to make. Next time you find yourself going onto a motorway, look and you will see that the “No Entry” sign is right next to the blue sign and there are generally two of them.

Anyway, all’s well that ends well and (singing) “I can laugh about it now but at the time it was terrible”. I blame primarily myself, then Italian road-planners, then TomTom (although to be fair he didn’t do anything wrong).

Anyway, all’s well that ends well. Moral: don’t believe everything you’re told: weigh things up and make your own informed decision.

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Rather than take this as a setback and a complete loss of valuable time, I am trying to see the positive in it, after all, there must be some somewhere. The pile of books to read is already prepared: Oliver Twist, Lustrum and The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, although this could change. That’s a fairly passive use of my time though; I’m looking for something creative to do, and am open to suggestions. My top fantasy at the moment (apart from reliving my lousy football career) is to write a novel, and this would be a good time to start getting some ideas down on paper (so to speak).

I have many short, witty anecdotes in mind, but no coherent thread – a bit like my life in fact. Maybe a story about an Englishman in France who develops a medical condition and…nah, it’s probably been done before.

The second is regarding the wearing of the Burqa, the full-length clothing with a full-face veil worn by a small proportion of Muslim women – the wearing of these is proposed to be banned in public buildings.  It seems to me that the two debates got mixed together.  For example, one of the proposals was that Muslim men who are seeking French nationality will have their application denied if they force their wives to wear the Burqa.

Anyway, it seems to me that the government has not been entirely just in trying to ban wearing of the Burqa. This garment is indeed (again, in my opinion), demeaning to women, and as far as I understand, nowhere in the Koran does it state that a woman should be covered from head-to-toe in public to (presumably) protect a man’s honour.

However, I have spotted a flaw in the argument; a loophole that needs closing immediately: What about Nuns? They wear Habits and what are they if not head-to-toe garments worn in public, serving no other purpose than to avert the gaze of amorous males! Does it state in the Bible that they should wear them? Does it not make it difficult to identify them on video surveillance cameras?

I say, SARKOZY: BE CONSISTENT – BAN NUNS FROM WEARING HABITS TODAY! Only then can you defrock (sic) the Muslim’s argument.

You see, he has been learning about opposites (remember, we are in France here so the English level is not greatly advanced). The trouble is, his teacher has taught them that the opposite of “tall” is “small”. I pointed out that in fact small is the opposite of “big” and the opposite of tall is “short”. This has stressed him out no end, the pressure to conform being extremely high: does he, during the test tomorrow, risk contradicting the teacher and either losing a mark or exposing the teacher’s error, or conform and propogate the misconception? I told him to do the right thing and put the right answer down, but I suspect he won’t.

I can’t come up with a reference (someone surely can), but I saw a clip on TV recently where 3 people were shown several pictures, each showing 3 lines of different lengths, and were asked to say which of the lines was the longest. The catch was that 2 of the 3 people had been briefed to say that the same, but shortest, line was in fact the longest one. The point of the experiment was to see how the other person would react in the face of this blatently incorrect information and whether he would conform.

As the first couple of pictures were shown, the guinea pig laughed more and more uncertainly as the others said that the shortest line was in fact longer than all the other lines in the drawing. After seeing only 3 drawings (I think), the guinea pig gave in, and agreed with the others saying that the shortest line was, in fact, the longest line in the drawing. The organisers said that this is common behaviour, whatever form the experiment takes (there are many).  The parallels with Germans’  acceptance of Nazi ideals has already been drawn, so I won’t stretch it to suggest that my son should take a stand against fascism and say in his test that his line might not be the longest, but it is certainly not the “smallest”.

Most, including me, would say that repeating this episode over-and-over rates very highly on my extremely objective “shallowness index“. But, mark my words Mister-Biased-Umpire – I know your name and I know where you live (well, I know the name of the town and there can’t be more than 30,000 inhabitants), and I have a copy of the Phone Directory. One day, when you are least expecting it, I will tap you on the shoulder, and…actually, I’ll just modify my memory of that day and move on to yet another century.

I must get (not) out more.

The ability to subtract two dates is therefore something that is beyond me – I usually convert the two to to a 64-bit integer, based on the number of seconds since January 1st, 1970 and then subtract one from the other, but I just couldn’t do this in my head – shame on me!

I guess my son isn’t going to hire me as his plumber’s assistant when he grows up.

It’s easy to add to fractions, right? You just multiply the numerator and denominator of the first number by the denominator of the second and multiply the numerator and denominator of the second by the denominator of the first and then add the resulting numerators and don’t change the resulting denominators, because the golden rule is that the denominators of all the numbers must be equal. And yes, I did use the words numerator and denominator instead of “top” and “bottom”, because that is what they learnt in class. OK, I was a bit more pedagogic than that, but you can see how complicated it can be put down in words.

It doesn’t help when your son says that he doesn’t need to learn maths because has been told by his (French) grandfather that he should become a plumber because they make loads of money without doing much work. When we pointed out to him that plumbers need to be able to add up in order to provide inflated bills to gullible customers, he still wasn’t impressed. He wants to be a rapper or a footballer – jobs that bring stardom and loadsamoney without the visible appearance of the exertion of too much energy.

Kids today, eh?

The trouble is, the ones I’m on now, while not being particularly effective, are also anti-depressives, and I feel f*****g great.