A CORONER has warned there are more than two million drivers on our roads whose failing eyesight makes them “ineffective and unsafe”;.
Dr James Adeley’s remarks came during an inquest at County Hall in Preston, Lancs, into the deaths of four people killed by drivers with poor vision.
Wisely, he has now written to Secretary Heidi Alexander to point out that Britain’s licensing system is one of the “laxest in Europe”; because we rely on self-reporting of visual conditions.
He also pointed out that, astonishingly, the is failing to refer cases to where it knows a driver has ignored instructions not to get behind the wheel, meaning that motorists can “lie without sanction”;.
Mary Cunningham, 79, and Grace Foulds, 85, were both hit by a car driven by a 68-year-old man who’d ignored medical advice telling him his eyesight was too poor to continue .
Anne Ferguson, 75, was killed by a 72-year-old van driver who’d already been told he had cataracts in both eyes, and Peter Westwell, 80, was killed by a car driven by a man with a history of severe bilateral eye disease but didn’t even wear glasses.
Maybe they all thought they could see perfectly well but the avoidable deaths they caused and the subsequent sentences bestowed upon them tell a different story.
This could so easily have been my mother.
Fiercely independent and a keen driver, one of the biggest arguments we ever had was when I prised her car keys from her hand and told her she must never drive again.
It had been a long and rocky conversation to that point, which started with a diagnosis of macular degeneration (“I can see perfectly well, thank you”;) and ended with her driving her Ka into one of those mini-islands in the centre of the road.
As I told her at the time, it could so easily have had pedestrians standing on it, and hitting them would have ruined their life, their family’s life, my mother’s life and, consequently, our family’s life.
Face the same battle
“Don’t be so ridiculously dramatic,”; she countered, saying that if I took away her car I would be robbing her of her independence.
I get it. From the second we pass our tests, a car is a symbol of freedom, taking us to wherever we want to go at a moment’s notice.
And if it gets taken away, it can feel as if the world has suddenly become a much smaller place.
But my mother lives in — a city with excellent transport links — so my forced removal of her car wasn’t such a sacrifice.
Yet now she’s living with and rarely remembers my name, she still has sharp recall of the day “you took my car away”; and regularly remonstrates with me about it.
You don’t have to be a psychoanalyst to work out that it had little to do with getting around and everything to do with not wanting to admit that she was no longer able to do something she’d always loved.
And there’s every chance that, when the time comes, my own kids might face the same battle with me.
Many European countries require mandatory vision screenings at a certain age but, as it stands, the UK’s DVLA says that drivers are “legally required”; to inform them “if they have a condition that affects their eyesight”;.
But as these recent deaths prove, they don’t always do that.
So perhaps, as Dr Adeley appears to be suggesting, it’s time to remove this awkward scenario from families and place it firmly in the hands of the state by introducing mandatory eye tests for drivers at, say, 70?
AMAZON billionaire and his fiancée are getting married in Venice in June.
Rumoured guests are, natch, , as well as , , etc etc, and the expected final bill is anywhere between $30million and, gulp, $500million.
A source at the floating city’s council says that Bezos is “extremely concerned about privacy”;.
In that case, given that both he and Ms Sanchez have been married before, perhaps an incognito getaway to their local US register office might have been preferable?
ROUND 2 FOR DON BLIMP?
IT’S rumoured that might welcome US President to the UK as early as this September.
prompts the question: Whatever happened to the Trump blimp?
Lest we forget, the last time “The Donald”; darkened these shores in 2019, London Mayor allowed a 20ft balloon of Trump in a nappy to be flown in Parliament Square.
Extensive research (Google search bar) tells me that the 6m high inflatable was donated to the Museum of London, where conservators plan to display it as part of a “protest”; collection when it re-opens on its new site in 2026.
But will it first be loaned out for a resurrection in September?
Watch this airspace.
Meghan over eggs it in Insta Easter post . . .
in astonishment, what has , Duchess of Sussex, spotted crossing the road in with its six babies?
A supposedly extinct dodo perhaps?
Or maybe the Loch Ness monster, Shergar or ET revisiting planet Earth with his kids?
But no. It’s a duck – and a common one at that. Cute, yes.
And great that someone was on hand with a camera to, er, spontaneously capture it walking in front of her for an Easter post.
But a sight worthy of such a performative response? Duck no.
Got it made
A SURVEY of 2,000 parents found one in five thinks that asking kids to do household chores such as making their bed partly amounts to child cruelty.
Hilarious. Particularly as, one assumes, many of them pay some poor adult the minimum wage to clean up after their little emperors.
