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.
Too many are dying on roads because of OAP drivers who should NOT be behind the wheel – the DVLA needs to get tough[/caption]
Wisely, he has now written to Transport 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 DVLA is failing to refer cases to police 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 driving.
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 prison 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 Ford 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 London — a city with excellent transport links — so my forced removal of her car wasn’t such a sacrifice.
Yet now she’s living with dementia 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.
Many European countries require mandatory vision screenings at a certain age[/caption]
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 Jeff Bezos and his fiancée Lauren Sanchez are getting married in Venice in June.
Rumoured guests are, natch, Oprah Winfrey, as well as Kim Kardashian, Leonardo DiCaprio, Bill Gates 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?
HAPPIER MINUS HARRY
CRESSIDA BONAS and husband Harry Wentworth-Stanley posted a photo at the weekend showing them enjoying a sunny day’s jaunt on a canal barge.
Heavily pregnant with their second child, Cressie is beaming with happiness.
Meanwhile, Chelsy Davy is married to Sam Cutmore-Scott and recently posted a photo of her contentedly enjoying a beach day with their two young children.
If the names don’t ring a bell, they were both once significant others in Prince Harry’s life but reportedly bailed out because they found the goldfish bowl (and accompanying media glare) of royal life too much.
Looks like they made the right decision.
ROUND 2 FOR DON BLIMP?
The last time Donald visited the UK, Sadiq Khan allowed a 20ft Trump Blimp to be flown in Parliament Square[/caption]
IT’S rumoured that King Charles might welcome US President Donald Trump to the UK as early as this September.
The controversial state visit prompts the question: Whatever happened to the Trump blimp?
Lest we forget, the last time “The Donald” darkened these shores in 2019, London Mayor Sadiq Khan 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.
ARTFUL DODGES
FOLLOWING Sir Keir Starmer’s systematic stripping of 69 historic portraits from No10, it’s been reported that Chancellor Rachel Reeves has been doing the same next door.
The 31 artworks she’s had removed from No11 include, among others, portraits of Sir Isaac Newton, William Pitt, Benjamin Disraeli and both King James l and ll.
She has replaced them with more contemporary pieces, including Covid Anxiety 5 (Mask Disorder), which resembles the scribble of an angry child.
That aside, haven’t our senior politicians got more important things to do than worrying about what’s on the office walls?
Meghan over eggs it in Insta Easter post . . .
Meghan Markle uploaded a video after spotting some ducklings crossing the road near her home in Montecito[/caption]
OPEN-MOUTHED and hands raised in astonishment, what has Meghan, Duchess of Sussex, spotted crossing the road in California 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 Instagram post.
But a sight worthy of such a performative response? Duck no.
LEITH OF LIFE
BAKE Off judge Dame Prue Leith, 85, reckons she hasn’t got long left.
Oh I don’t know.
We recently appeared on a fashion show catwalk together just hours after she’d stepped off a long-haul flight from Australia, and when she appeared as a guest on Loose Women last week she sprang on to the set like a mountain goat.
Something tells me her “best by” date is still a long way off.
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.