Men are worse drivers than women

Yes you can disagree but I don’t really care...

I tend to do 80 in the fast lane; I try not to do over that. There is a reason our motorways are the safest in Europe. Yes, Europe. The whole of Europe. And that’s because our speed limit is 70. You may disagree and think it’s too slow and that somehow your man or womanhood is called into question by this outrage but again, I don’t really care. That’s the speed limit and even then, if the conditions are right, I'm going over that.

So today, I was zipping along at 80. I was doing 80 because visibility was good, as was (surprisingly!) the weather and traffic. As I came up quite a steep hill passed Plymouth. Maddy (my car) start to slow to 70 before she changed gear (she's an automatic), and I made the decision to swap to the inside lane because I could see that there was traffic behind me that hadn’t slowed – or hadn’t really appeared to. Before that happened however – some fuckwad decide to overtake on the inside and then the most extraordinary thing happened. He slowed right down, flashed his hazards and was gesticulating toward the middle lane. Now I thought he’d overtaken and suddenly lost power. Confirmed, I thought, when he virtually stopped in the fast lane. I indicated and then went to go round him. As soon as I was in the middle lane (and that had now snarled up as we all changed lanes to get out of his way), he suddenly sped up. Ah! He was trying to make the point that 70 was too slow and so had almost stopped his vehicle in the fast lane of one the busiest roads in Devon to demonstrate my own fallibility as a driver…

A woman would simply not have done that. A woman may have shouted, driven too close to make a point, she may even have gesticulated and shaken her fists. But she would not have pulled one of stupidest and potentially one of the most dangerous things I’ve ever seen on a motorway. The irony is, he then pulled in front of me and was going too slow and down the road I had to overtake him. As I did so we looked at each other and I indicated that he was a self-abuser and drove on without further incident.

There’s a reason car insurance for women is so much cheaper. Of course, as he probably couldn’t read or string a sentence together, that fact would have been lost on him.

On a brighter note, I’ve made some lovely sandwiches for work today!