Jeremy goes Greek
The other day, I drove past a speed camera and, like all decent law-abiding people, I slowed to ensure it wouldn't flash. But it did. And the same thing happened a few miles down the road. The speedo said I was doing 50. The limit was 50. But it flashed too.It took me several miles and much head-scratching to figure out the problem. And it was this: as middle age turns to autumn and the reaper begins to sharpen his scythe in anticipation of my imminent arrival, my eyesight is not quite what it was, and I had simply misread the speedometer. I had, in fact, been doing 60.
I should make it plain that I can still read a road sign on the moon. Things that are far away are pin-sharp, but close up, it's like I'm underwater. Every phone call I make goes through to someone else entirely. I point at things on menus and get something completely different. And when I have to read out the number of my WiFi router to a man in India, he fixes the problem for someone who is in Vancouver. I was talking to Esther Rantzen the other day and found her very attractive.
Of course, for reading I now wear spectacles, and that's fine. But I cannot wear them when I am in the car, because although the satnav and the dials become pin-sharp, the view outside the windscreen goes all blurry. Lorries become cars. Cars become motorcycles. Motorcycles disappear completely.
I tried a pair of bifocals the other day, but they gave me a headache and made me fall down a flight of stairs. Wearing bifocals is like being constantly drunk and often terrified. Certainly, I would not wish to be charged by a polar bear while wearing them because it would be very, very far away and then, just as you relaxed, enormous and right next to you.
God knows how people drive in specs with two lenses in the same spectacle. Oncoming traffic is in another county one minute and the next, it's in your glove box and there is a lot of blood followed by a policeman whose helmet is five miles across but whose shoes are the size of thimbles.
Anyway, because of this, I was done by two cameras and I wonder what would happen should the cases ever reach court. Would blindness be a defence? Would they let me off? You can bet both buttocks that the answer to that is a resounding ‘No.' They'd fine me a million pounds and make me break rocks for a thousand years.
There is, however, a solution. You just have to become Greek.
As older readers may remember, I usually have a bit of a problem with the Greeks because once, many years ago, while on the hideous island of Crete, I was arrested because a swarthy man shoved his horrible hairy hand up my girlfriend's skirt, and when I said "Now look here, old chap", he punched me in the side of the head. And then when the fat and stupid policeman who arrested me broke the key in the ignition of his squad car, I was made to get out and push.
The story ended quite well. When I got to the top of a hill, I gave his pathetic little Fiat a good shove and scarpered. I also managed to remove the handcuffs before I was faced two days later with the bothersome business of getting my manacled hands through the airport X-ray machine.
"The best thing about Corfu was the sheer joy of driving in a country where no one really cares if you’re blind"It's not just personal, though. We must remember the Greek army has pompoms on its shoes, and the food is terrible. What other country grows vines, throws the grapes away, eats the leaves and then makes its wine out of creosote? Also, sodomy is alarmingly popular.
However, despite many misgivings about the place, I took my summer holiday this year on the Greek island of Corfu. I quite liked it. But the best thing was the sheer joy of driving in a country where no one really cares if you are blind, mad or a horse.
When I rented what felt like a 400cc Audi, the man with the rental company, who was called Stavros - he wasn't really - said he must explain how it worked. He opened the door, sat in the driver's seat and this is exactly what he said: "This is the steering wheel, and the key goes in here". That was it.
And I think, pretty much, that's the advice given out to learner drivers as well, since everyone drives on whatever side of the road takes their fancy, at whatever speed is necessary in whatever sort of vehicle had been nearest to their front door. You see people on buggies, people in Peugeots, people on quad bikes, people with no helmets or even shirts on fast motorbikes. It's a free-for-all.
Drink-driving laws? Oh, I'm sure they have some. They must do. Greece is in the EU. But I think they are enforced in the same way that the British police enforce the rule which allows pregnant women to urinate on taxi drivers. In Greece, it's as though the government has said: "Here's a road. Now use it. And if you get mangled, don't come crying to us."
There is a drawback to this, of course. In 2006, which is the last year for which figures are available, 3,335 people were killed on the roads of Britain. In Greece, which has a population of seven, the number was 84 million. Over there, there are only two ways to die. Being killed in a car crash. Or being killed in a motorbike crash.
There are some upsides to this though. You will not die of a bone disease or as a result of a spike being driven into your head by a lunatic. Nor will you tread on a sea urchin and die that way, because, of course, you will have been killed on the way to the beach.
It gets better. Life is so much more relaxed if you don't have to spend half your life worrying about how much wine you had at lunchtime and whether you've read the speedometer correctly and whether you're wearing your seatbelt. The phone rings. You pick it up. No problem.
Obviously, it is only right and proper that a burglar should spend his life looking over his shoulder. He is a criminal and he has got to think about not leaving clues for the police. But someone who's driving along in a car, after a nice lunch, he isn't a criminal. He's just a nice chap out with some friends on a sunny day. The Greek police will probably pull him over to see if he's seen any burglars or vagabonds in the area - real baddies who they can get their teeth into.
I spoke with one chap over there about the newly imposed smoking ban. "Yes", he said, in a sort of Topol voice. "It is now banned in public places, but it will not work. Everyone will carry on." Of course they will, and no action will be taken because to smoke a cigarette in a bar, on a pleasant night out with your family, is not even a quarter of the way to 0.1 per cent of a crime.
Of course, there is another drawback that I should mention at this point. Because the police only bother themselves with rapists and people who hit old ladies over the head with bricks, the magistrates cannot sit in court all day taking money from ordinary people for doing nothing wrong. And as a result, Greece has gone bankrupt.
But apart from the death rate and the bankruptcy, and the rioting which has resulted, and the pompoms and the sodomy and the retsina and the vine leaves, there is much we can learn from Johnny Greek.
This article was originally published in the November issue of Top Gear magazine
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