Clunk Click Every Trip

I still find it amazing that a significant number of people still don’t bother putting their seatbelts on when driving.

As a result, Norfolk police are this week having a campaign to catch people driving without seatbelts , which has to be a good thing. According to the story, officers expect to issue hundreds of tickets over the next seven days. (I wonder if they’ll also be checking for tosspots still using mobile phones while driving – hope so!)

Last year 2,111 people were fined for not wearing a seatbelt in Norfolk. The last time Norfolk held a special campaign, the number fined leapt to 440 over a two-week period.

I’ve always worn a seatbelt, and to be honest can’t imagine not doing so. But I see people doing so every day – or pulling away from a junction, or carpark, or whatever, and then pulling the seatbelt across them while driving along. I’d love to see some of those pillocks stopped and fined, I must admit.

Interestingly, my dad’s now had two driving accidents, one either side of the seatbelt law.

In the first, he hit black ice and rolled the car down a slope. He’s always said that in that case if he’d been wearing a seatbelt, he’d have been trapped in the car and unable to get out. As it was, he walked away with a bundle of bruises.

In the second, he was hit head-on by an idiot Frenchman driving round a blind corner on the wrong side of the road. In that one, he was wearing the seatbelt (by then it was law) and says that if he hadn’t been wearing it, he’d have gone through the windscreen and probably died.

Not that any of that is an excuse for not wearing seatbelts, of course.