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Thursday, June 29, 2006
14:12 
Must've been born in a tank
 Last night I had a serious disagreement with a close relative. Never mind which one, but we're talking consensus, biologically-related relative.
We had just finished watching a telly programme in which a company director got 6 years for killing someone while driving and using his mobile phone; a sentence I didn't buy for an instant given the leniency of sentencing usually meted out for such things. This led to a discussion of the perceived rights and wrongs of sentencing of careless drivers.
Said relative insisted that penalties were often too harsh — after all, while the consequences of a moment's inattention can be and often are horrific, there is no intent. A driver doesn't mean to kill someone. But it's so easy to be driving along at 35mph in a village like ours and a child runs out and there's nothing you can do because maybe you're a bit tired or you've had a split second of inattention. Everyone does it (except me, apparently — said relative was quick to qualify that I don't do it, having been a passenger in my car). Prisons are for criminals. Careless driving should always be a matter for the Sheriff's Court. It shouldn't be a criminal matter. It's not fair. Horrific consequences don't mean that the perpetrator should be punished severely. They're just ordinary people who make a mistake and unfortunately the effects are catastrophic.
I observed that the motor vehicle is the only piece of heavy machinery that we as a society permit to be operated in a public place and do not treat negligent use of which as manslaughter.
Said close relative wasn't having that. It only takes a split second of inattention, something that we all do. Prisons are full of criminals, this isn't a criminal act.
Now only a couple of weeks ago there was another conversation in which various family members were relating close shaves whilst driving, including a near collision with a tree that had come down in a storm. I noted that one should not be driving so fast that one is unable to stop in the distance one can see to be clear. At this point it really was like something out of Invasion of the Bodysnatchers. All heads swivelled in my direction and there were open mouths and staring. My mother asked me if I was sure I had sprung from her loins. One relative went as far as to exclaim, in genuine surprise: "Wha' sort o' alien gibberish is tha'?!" He then told me about the time that he had come round a corner to find some 'numpty' had crashed, and he nearly hit the crashed car. If he had done, he said, he'd have sued them for obstruction.
Occasionally there are moments in conversations when I have to walk away. That was one of them. Last night was another, although the close relative tried to win me over to the cause by appealing to Frood — a tactic guaranteed to have the opposite effect.
Since moving back home I have been made more and more aware of how apart I feel from the rest of my family. How different I am. How my politics and philosophies are almost diametrically opposed.
I wonder how my conservative, industrialist, occasionally bigoted family could have produced a bisexual tree-hugger like me. Nature vs nurture, eh? I'm so much like them in so many ways, but I still feel like the purple sheep of the family.
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