Blindspot
The Grim Reaper
No. 23 in a never-ending series. Winter 1998
I often wonder why one bumps into quite so many things when one is driving a car. After all, most of us have two eyes and a brake pedal and all we have to do is to drive slowly in a straight line between traffic jams.
However, it seems that we are defeated by the simplest of tasks. If children can pass their driving tests at 17, why do mature adults have so many accidents? Admittedly we are sometimes too drunk or going too fast to be able to avoid stray cyclists or pedestrians. As we age we fall prey to increasing distraction as our powers of concentration wane. Advancing years also slow reaction time and can produce a tendency to 'nod off' without warning. All these factors can explain the occasional bump. But what if we've only had a gin or two and allowed plenty of time for the effects to wear off? What if we've finished our in-car picnic, made our mobile phone calls, tuned the radio, and are comfortably settled into our brushed pigskin ergonomically contoured bucket seat for a relaxing drive home when we still crash? What if the only words you can find to explain yourself are, I'm sorry, officer, but I didn't see a thing.
I can sense some of my more extreme readers muttering Well you bloody well should be looking where you are going.
But perhaps they were and they still couldn't see. The Grim Reaper can reveal that a very large number of motorists may quite literally be going blind.
It takes a lot to alarm the Grim Reaper after years of revealing the endlessly imaginative ways in which the car has spread death, despondency and destruction in its wake. When the Grim Reaper is alarmed, the world worries. Let me tell you, dear lemmings, I'm very alarmed indeed.
Research uncovered by The Guardian newspaper and mentioned in passing has indicated that there is a link between the huge increase in blindness in urban areas and particulates from car exhaust lodging on the retina and causing macular degeneration. The Grim Reaper believes there's no smoke without fire, and indeed this has been confirmed by my subsequent research. Whilst a spokesperson for Bristol Council (rather myopically I suspect) dismissed the theory as rather implausible
, a consultant source in the Bristol Eye Hospital has confirmed the likelihood of a link. Blindness is increasing dramatically
, he tells me, especially in the developed urban world. Over the past thirty years, the number of people registering blind with macular degeneration has increased by 50%, and all age groups have been affected, though the greatest increase is amongst the elderly.
Research is still in early stages but the prime suspects,
he continues, include car pollution and other environmental factors.
Time will no doubt prove the Grim Reaper right, (as on many previous occasions), that driving is not only a type of self abuse, but that it will also make us all go blind.
So the next time you are cut up, dear reader, think twice before you accusingly ask a driver if they're blind. They may indeed be blind or partially sighted, and deserving of rather more sympathy. After all, it could be you next.
The Grim Reaper
