Thriller in CD player may keep you safe on N1 ‘death stretch’

CUTTING across the Great Karoo, the road between Beaufort West and Aberdeen runs almost as straight as an arrow for a mind-numbing 150km. There’s a warning sign somewhere along that stretch saying “High Accident Zone”; and you look along the route and you can see forever as the tarmac disappears over the distant horizon.

You wonder why anyone should have an accident here. There’s no traffic to be seen, no buildings that could hide drunk pedestrians, no animals in sight that could run into the road, and not even a tree behind which an evil hijacker could lurk, so how could it be a high-accident zone?

The answer soon becomes apparent as the long, boring kilometres slip by.

With nothing to keep your attention, your eyes start to droop and you find yourself nodding off peacefully behind the wheel. It obviously happens to enough drivers to prompt the road authorities to put up a “High Accident Zone” sign.

It must be very irritating to the farmers along that route to have cars with sleeping drivers crashing through their fences from time to time and bothering their goats.

If you’re planning to drive along that route any time, I can offer a suggestion: go to your local library and select a couple of “talking book” CDs. They certainly work like a charm for me. If possible get a tense detective novel with plenty of twists to the plot. Agatha Christie is good at that.

As the kilometres roll by, you’ll be wondering who poisoned the wealthy heiress and whether the local policeman could have arrested the wrong man.

(Of course he did. The policemen in detective novels always arrest the wrong man. It takes a Hercule Poirot to point out that he could not possibly have fired the gun because he was left handed and the murder weapon had a safety catch on the right side.)

There’s no way you could nod off during a Poirot mystery in case you miss a vital clue.

I think the original reason for producing talking books was to make the stories accessible to people with weak eyesight. I believe they are also safety features, like air bags, and traffic authorities should recommend them to all motorists who go on long journeys. Even those with perfect vision.

Maybe the AA could establish a talking book CD library as part of its service to members. Just a thought.

Last Laugh

During a TV sports programme a university sports coach was being interviewed about his successful rugby team.

“Is it true?” the interviewer asked, “that your university offers scholarships to rugby players who are actually too stupid to get into university if they had to write the usual entrance exams, simply so you can win the inter-varsity matches?” That’s a dirty lie!,” the coach said. “An official report recently showed that most of the players in our first rugby team had achieved straight A’s in their midyear exams.”

He paused and added emphatically, “Two of them even got pretty straight B’s and one is expected to achieved a recognisable C by the final exam.”