Let’s have a show of hands – and indicators – for safety

She was over for the weekend and I was driving her somewhere when I stopped to give way to an elderly chap in a Ford Focus.

‘Richard, you are a gentleman of the road,’ she said.

Cue silence from the wife, strange noise from the beagle and probably some kind of mumbled response from me.

I am not a gentleman of the road. I used to be, back in 2008 BFOR (Before Five Oaks Roundabout). But those days are long gone. At best I’m now a harmless critic – the sort of guy who drives around chuntering to himself about other motorists’ failings.

At worst I’m an arrogant, bad-tempered and miserable man who lacks patience and makes journeys seem that much longer for his passengers.

But it’s other motorists who have done this to me. Specifically, it’s the belief held by some that indicators, just like air-con and heated seats, are optional extras, and it’s that little traffic island where this phenomenon is played out with spectacular stupidity each day.

THE Five Oaks roundabout is an unnecessarily confusing gauntlet I have run every morning and afternoon since I moved to Jersey five years ago.

And it’s starting to upset me, because at roundabouts I don’t like to be kept guessing.

Guessing, because if you are coming from St Martin and want to turn down to Grainville you have to indicate right, otherwise the journalist coming up from Bagatelle Road will assume you are heading in the direction he has just come from and he will pull out and you will crash.

Guessing, because if you are coming from Princes Tower Road and are heading towards Grainville, you do not indicate left because the journalist coming up from Bagatelle Road will assume you are heading in the direction he has just come from and he will pull out and you will crash.

And guessing, because if you are coming from Princes Tower Road and are heading in the direction the journalist has just come from, you have to indicate left, otherwise the journalist will assume you are heading towards Grainville and he will sit there waiting and this will waste his time.

Through a mixture of good fortune and some excellent observation work, I have never had a metal-on-metal experience at Five Oaks. I can spot them, you see.

They sit there displaying either too much confidence (easy to spot because they always look too young for the car they are driving) or too little confidence (easy to spot because they permanently look confused and scared out of their minds, like there is too much going on outside the car to be bothered fiddling around with the indicators).

And so I just sit there and smugly wait for them to breeze by.

This moment of self-congratulation is only ever ruined when the guy behind starts beeping his horn because he thinks it’s you who doesn’t understand the system.

And you just want to get out and tell him you understand perfectly well, but you’ve identified the driver coming from St Martin as a troublemaker who’s going to swing past to your left and off in the direction of Grainville even though he is not indicating. And then you are proved right.

And there’s the other type of motorist – the ones who do exactly what every driving instructor and, more importantly, the Highway Code tell you not to do. They do the unthinkable. And they have no idea that what they are doing is so very, very wrong. They are the ones who wave you out at a roundabout.

There you are, waiting for the driver at the exit to your right to make his or her move, and suddenly they start grinning and inexplicably ushering you out as if they are doing you the biggest favour in the world.

You sit there open-mouthed thinking ‘What on earth are you doing?’ and within seconds the whole roundabout system has collapsed. Drivers sit there shaking their heads in disbelief and fear as the time-honoured tradition (law, actually) of giving way to the motorist on your right crumbles around them.

This type of driver, by the way, is usually a Beeper – the sort whose driving peculiarities don’t stop when they leave Five Oaks.

They are the would-be ever-so-cautious lot, the ones who are so damned sensible they make their cornering (usually on narrow green lanes) as loud as possible by sounding their horns to minimise the risk of a head-on collision.

But they are an ever so odd bunch – odd because I have never once seen one slow down after sounding their horn. They just continue as normal, apparently in the belief that the horn deploys some kind of invisible forcefield that will harmlessly deflect an oncoming vehicle.

BACK at the roundabout, everyone just sits there confused until one brave motorist (usually in a 4×4) boldly takes the lead and the system reboots and you all drive off shaken but alive.

There are are two serious points to all this, though. Firstly, for a small Island we seem to have a tremendous number of road accidents, and I can’t help but think that some of this is down to the apparent non-use of indicators.

Why so few people bother to use this very important motoring tool is not clear, but it is surely down to either laziness or an over-familiarity with our small road network and the assumption that everyone else will just know where you are going so there’s no need to spell it out.

But as our roads get busier, the confusion this causes is only going to increase and so the accidents will multiply.

The second point is that sooner or later I am going to get my head kicked in.

It’s nearly happened before – about 18 months ago – when I mouthed a rude word and gesticulated at a non-indicator van driver at Five Oaks roundabout.

He saw me and stopped – literally, on the roundabout – and got out, but he left just enough room for me to squeeze by and head off down Bagatelle Road.

I remember wondering what I would do if he decided to follow me, and I concluded I would claim to have actually been singing along to a 1980s power ballad on the radio – probably a Bon Jovi song or something – that required me to open my mouth really wide and wave my arms up and down.

I DON’T profess to be the greatest driver in the world, and I have a two-foot-long scrape above my front left wheel to prove it. But what I sometimes lack in spatial awareness I make up for in common sense and a general understanding of the Highway Code.

Having driven on roads across the UK and Europe (including Sicily, where I seemingly found myself involved in a big game of dodgems), I have never found a more frustrating place to be behind the wheel than Jersey and I believe it is, quite literally, driving me mad.

Richard Heath