Chop chop whizz whizz corre corre

I con­fess. Once upon a dis­tant time I was a hope­less speed freak. I used to test high per­for­mance cars for a liv­ing, fly­ing all over the world to hur­tle round race­tracks, skid and slide along rally stages, thun­der down Ger­man au­to­bahns and gen­er­ally push the lim­its.

There was the adren­a­lin rush of snow and water too. I skied the black run Swizz Wall in Avo­riaz which has health warn­ings at the top and is so steep and vast you can't see what lies ahead. I crewed on a rac­ing yacht, punch­ing through storms day and night, dodg­ing super-tankers, fer­ries, trawlers and one alarm­ing sub­ma­rine which sud­denly sur­faced be­side us. I even played a minor part in a tilt at the world speed sail­ing record, but we only man­aged to get up to 80 kilo­me­tres per hour. The record now stands at a knee-knock­ing 121 kph.

The key word in the first sen­tence was hope­less. Maybe that is a bit too damn­ing, but I was never ac­com­plished. All the com­pet­i­tive car events, de­spite per­sonal tu­ition by for­mer For­mula 1 world cham­pion Jackie Stew­art, came to nought. We never won an off­shore sail­ing race. I sur­vived The Swiss Wall by sheer good for­tune. As for the sub­ma­rine.....

But that was then, when I thought I was in­de­struc­tible and a few of us were given the chance to test that the­ory. I con­formed to a few basic safety rules, sur­vived and eased off the ac­cel­er­a­tor 20 years ago.

The truth is it was a much slower world in the Eight­ies and early Nineties, so much so that what I once con­sid­ered dar­ingly brisk now causes my 15-year-old to break out in a fit of yawn­ing.

Now the urge to rush, risk and lu­di­crous spec­ta­cle is a pan­demic. YouTube is loaded with ex­treme sports nuts de­fy­ing the laws of grav­ity, com­puter games seemed to have ac­quired the same com­pul­sive ex­trem­ism, super-cars will soon ar­rive at their des­ti­na­tions be­fore they have set off, and a stu­pid num­ber of peo­ple be­hind the wheel of the swift fam­ily trans­port show a stun­ning dis­re­gard for the sim­ple laws of physics.

Two of those basic safety rules I re­ferred to that kept me safe were car con­trol and dis­tance. Fast is fine if the laws, con­di­tions and traf­fic dic­tate it to be so, or if you are on a race cir­cuit. If not, and you per­sist, you are an utter berk, an ac­ci­dent wait­ing to hap­pen.

The mod­ern con­di­tion of breath­less rush, the con­se­quence of the un­sus­tain­able pace of life in gen­eral, man­i­fests it­self in its ugli­est and most dan­ger­ous form on our roads, where bul­ly­ing, tail­gat­ing and reck­less over­tak­ing are shock­ingly, stu­pidly preva­lent.

It is a kind of mad­ness that can af­flict the mildest of ei­ther sex. In the numb­ing, co­coon­ing com­fort of a mod­ern car you could so eas­ily be in an arm­chair play­ing a video game. Well you are not. You may feel safe. You are not. There is a dire need to shake peo­ple out of this stu­por of mind­less risk-tak­ing.

Just back off. It is bet­ter to ar­rive than to never ar­rive at all.