In Sept 2008 I suffered a soaking south of Oban and the windscreen of my Aixam microcar misted up. I was shivering badly and had to stop frequently to wipe the windscreen in the INSIDE. I inadvertently made an illegal right turn in Oban in driving rain and was spotted then whisked to hospital with exposure symptoms, discharged spent a night in Oban and returned uneventfully to Dunfermline. On another occasion I was BLOWN BACKWARDS at Auchtertool and collided at about walking pace with a car heading up the hill known as Newbiggin Bank. DVLA required me to sit a driving test after police reports about these quite minor incidents where NO tangible harm came to anybody. The original green Aixam was beyond economic repair because of its intrinsic flawed design and bought back in part exchange for the present blue one that was reconditioned and had done only 10,000 miles. Soon after delivery of the blue one ALL the damning flaws of the design were woefully apparent. Though it was driveable in dry summer weather the engine falters in downpours, the windscreen persists on misting up in damp weather and the engine CUTS OUT when I bear right.
I am however bound to declare that when I rode scooters I was frequently obliged to stop so as to restore my circulation even in summer and I can NEVER NOW ride a scooter any distance because of the wind chill factor. For all of my adult life I have gone on strenuous Sunday hikes in beauty spots and this is a crucial element in my personal quality of life. The blue Aixam enabled me to reach Durness and climb remote mountains. Without it I can no longer reach most of the Highlands. It is the MEANS TO REACH the Highlands NOT an end in itself.
DVLA have long contested my right to drive Aixams which are in Britain “heavy quadricycles” but taxed at the same rate as Minis though weighing under 400 Kg and having 450cc GLOWPLUG engines (NOT repeat NOT diesel) which is sadly their Achilles heels. After about 2,000 miles the green Aixam became as much an extension of my body as my artificial leg. Apart from a few misjudgements I have now covered 17,000 uneventful miles at MODEST speeds at 100 mpg. I am acutely cognisant of such matters as the 3.5m turning radius and all that flows from the pig-headed refusal of the British to accept metrication such as misjudging how much fuel is left. We but fuel by the LITRE but it is still MILES from place to place! And yet Government maps are calibrated in km squares!
I was very in edge when I arrived at the SMART centre having been delayed on the bus ride. I was made to play with puzzles of the sort given to very small children. I identified road signs and had to read a passage about a Shrewsbury man as though I was a foreign immigrant required to locate English county towns. I had caused offence by wearing a smart jacket, clean white shirt but khaki home made Gripperbreeks that securely hold my false leg on WITHOUT NHS straps that come asunder. I continued to cause offence with my Daily Telegraph English. I was grilled about my personal habits and why I owned a funny foreign car. I was finally to cause the very utmost offence by saying that I NEVER INTEND to buy a full size car because it is too costly to run!
The Junta who were grilling me acted in a very Kafkaesque manner. One of them had heard about Asperger’s Syndrome and shut me up. I was forced to tell them why I had no job since 1971 and why I had been admitted twice to mental hospitals and something about my father’s constant denigrations that caused them to frown, then I had to admit that I suffer badly from bronchitis and in 1952 was admitted to hospital and in bed through the severe winter of 1953 and also how cigarette smoke and motor fumes made me ill. As thought I was admitting that I had convictions for sex offences! A Levantine-looking man with very badly accented English mixed up ULLAPOOL with LIVERPOOL when I was forced to confess that I had driven twice from Ullapool to Dunfermline taking 14 hours on each journey and they refused to accept that the largest city I had driven through is Dunfermline itself or that 95% of my journeys are to the Highlands. I could NOT satisfy them because I have no intention whatsoever of driving in to cities and all who take to the roads must in their eyes be capable of surviving the ordeal of driving through Edinburgh or London – which is the most squalid city in Europe? Perhaps Edinburgh. Britain is not France where octogenarian grandmothers drive sentry boxes on wheels happily up and down steep hills in Normandy (Not that I would expect my tormentors to know Normandy).
Then came the ORDEAL in a Vauxhall as heavy as a taxi. I was dumped in a seat where I immediately got itching and back pains, nowhere to park my false leg comfortably and above all else the steering wheel was so awkwardly placed that I ad the very utmost difficulty steering the car. The HORN was operated by a thing in the middle and I inadvertently operated it as I turned the wheel. I GAVE INSTRUCTIONS TO MYSELF as my tormentors breathed down my neck and a woman repeatedly distracted me. I soon got hopelessly lost in the hospital grounds which have narrow rutted tarmac tracks as ill maintained as the road to the foot of Ben Hope with enormous potholes. I was soon in a state of acute panic and suffering progressive incapacitation due to the nagging pain in the back and SINISTER sensations of incipient cramp in both legs. My mental compass was spinning as if I was in a strange foreign city and I desperately wanted to stop and lie down as sensations in back and legs – as bad as my sporadic IBS – gripped me.
During the final Inquisition I was told basically that I was quite unfit to be on the road and one reason was that I GAVE INSTRUCTIONS TO MYSELF. This reminds me of equally hurtful interviews where I was made to be worse than bad or mad because when provoked as I was most certainly on that occasion I “GO TO PIECES” and the act of TALKING TO ONESELF marked me out as a madman in the Victorian definition of “maniac”. So I left, shattered and later on Blackford Hill I was assailed by chest pains which have worried me ever since.
The imminent sharp rise in motor fuel prices will price many people off the roads and confine them effectively to corridors served by such public transport that still exists. It will pace large areas of Britain OUT OF BOUNDS unless people have vehicles as thrifty as the Aixam. I must now make observations on the behaviour of the Junta. I am drawing up a Civil Servants Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome in support of the O’Donnell Bill which will deal in depth with the ingrained prejudice so rife in high places.
We Aspies have NO HOPE of ever satisfying authoritarians because out autonomous fear related reflexes take over then confronted with people like the Junta at SMART. No mater how skilled we are at any given task when pursuing it unharassed we will break down sooner or later if people are breathing down our necks. As Debi Brown has explained so eloquently we with AS are readily overwhelmed by everyday input overloads. Consider me proceeding along the Mid-Clacks road even in driving rain. I have a mental map of its entirety which is instantly updated when I spot road works. I flow along it at 60 KPH in daylight or 40 KPH after dark as automatically as I walk down Dunfermline’s streets. I am alert and spot other road users and indeed stray animals. When I encountered football hooligans in Falkirk I assumed that they would deliberately leap into my path to provoke an accident or jump onto the bonnet and smash the windscreen. On that occasion I readily imagined being assaulted by successive groups of drunken hooligans and my Amygdalic Shunt was taking over as I crawled past fearful with every good reason that the hooligans would push the Aixam over and beat me to death. These actual incidents illustrate how I behave in the road. It is acting according to PRESUMPTIONS on the part of other road users in such a way that I an always in full control. When incapacitated by input overloads I show it by such ways as talking to myself and of course involuntary SWEARING. I recall a few incidents of this sort where I was in severe discomfort at the limits of language. My ordeal in the Vauxhall was a bad as these incidents. My tormentors could no more understand my pain than Arab terrorists who torture kidnapped Europeans nor can they accept that AS is NOT a moral failing NOR is it to be equated as they did with MENTAL DEFICIENCY but it is a differentness of brain function that most emphatically gives rise to such fail-safe behaviours on the road as the Falkirk incident where of course I gave the hooligans a wide berth. SO we Aspies are forced into collisions with the Heavy Hand of Authority or rather its steamroller and we are crushed and dumped by the wayside.
I could suggest a fair test whereby I would have been followed in my Aixam along FAMILIAR roads near my home by someone with a video camera. Now I have to underscore the absolutely fundamental difference between thrifty microbars and ordinary vehicles. Microcars will HAVE TO SUPPLANT ordinary cars simply because of their fuel economy! On the Continent NO PROBLEM as they are already ubiquitous. IF I can ONLY regain my licence by passing in a Vauxhall as heavy as a taxi I am doomed to fail and I will be denied access to the Highlands for the rest of my life. Countless thousands of elderly and disabled motorists will be denied access to places without adequate public transport of forbidden to drive thrifty microcars for such insulting reasons as they are TOO SLOW! My Strict Consequentialism states that we have an inalienable right to go wherever we wish in thrifty microcars but of course this logic is as alien to our masters as the principles of flight to unlettered aborigines. We must therefore FIGHT for our right to move thriftily from place to place.
David Seagrave, Dunfermline Library 19-3-2010
