The other day, I was driving back from Brive in the 107
Noddy car. I took the lower road that runs past the gipsy encampment because
the back road was blocked by the work on Quatre Routes' flood-drains. I suspect
I was on automatic pilot and maybe my mind was a little elsewhere, as is too
often the case these days. I turned off the road to cross the adjacent
level-crossing. Of course there was music playing, but not too loudly to
compromise road safety. One of the speakers is knackered anyway, and I've
pinched it with a clothes peg to stop the cone distorting horribly. Suddenly, I
realised that the crossing's lights were flashing and the bells were ringing.
It was too late to brake and the barriers were coming down. I pushed down hard
on the accelerator and just made it to safety. But only just. Had I been
driving a more 'muscular', masculine car, with a higher axle and roof, my momentum
could have been arrested by the barrier. And then...
I think it's Maggie O'Farrell who has just brought out a
memoir based on ten close encounters with death. Ten's a lot for someone
younger than I am. Apart from the time as a drunken teenager when I stepped out
onto the ledge of a top-floor window at a party and held on to the gutter just
above my head, most of my close-shaves have involved cars. Run over when
stepping onto a road in Verona. Taking a bend too fast on a main road in the
rain and sliding across the adjacent lane. Failure to spot a Stop! sign. My
crimes are legion. On this last occasion, I could have argued extenuating
circumstances. It shook me up, though, and made me think. No wonder I'm so
aware of the risks every time one gets into a car.
A long road trip one we had of it this month, from home to
the port of Toulon on the Côte d'Azur. It took us an hour to crawl through
Toulon and reach the port, where we were to catch the ferry to Ajaccio for our
first visit to Corsica. It didn't exactly warm me to the city, even if we got there
safely in the end. I hadn't realised how central is the rugby stadium, where
the erstwhile behemoths of French rugby play. I believe there's a commemorative
statue to their adopted son, Jonny Wilkinson. I didn't see it.
Everyone has been telling us how beautiful the isle of
Corsica is. My mate Eddie Palmieri, the legendary salsero, told me that his family came originally from Corsica via
Puerto Rico (God rest it's battered landscape). My Dutch friend up the road,
who spent several years there, also warned me about the roads. It takes hours
to get from A to B because you wind up one mountain and then down the next. So
what's a few hairpin bends between friends?
The ferry was enormous. Driving past the side of the boat as
we embarked, it seemed about as high as a municipal tower block. Swarthy men in
fluorescent yellow overalls directed the traffic inside the cavernous hold.
They barked out their commands in a strange kind of Franco-Italian. We surmised
that they were probably Sardinians, given that this is another of the ferry
company's destinations. Anyway, we didn't hang about.
The yellow ferrymen looked likely candidates for road-rage
once behind the wheel of a car. We didn't yet know it when we disembarked at
Ajaccio early the next morning, but road-rage would become a keynote of our
Corsican holiday. Before first light, the backdrop of mountains hung like a
menacing stage set over the town. While the surface of the main road south
seemed better than expected – my Dutch friend shattered a shock absorber in an
island pothole a few years back – we were soon driving up a mountain via a
tortuous series of bends. It's no more than about 60 kilometres to Propriano,
but it took well over an hour to get up and down one mountain and then up and
down the next.
Propriano itself is nothing much to write home about. It's a
port with a main drag and some faceless chain-stores on the periphery. But my
God, what a backdrop! Mountains, as far as the eye can see. Real mountains, not
County Down's 'Mountains' of Mourne, that sweep down to the bluest sea I've yet
set eyes on.
So far, so good. But the longer we stayed, and the better we
got to know the place, the more we could confirm two things: that Corsica is
undoubtedly the most beautiful island in the Med and possibly the most
beautiful one in the northern hemisphere; and that you take your life in your
hands on its roads. One lapse of concentration and you're over the edge. But
more to the point, the local drivers are maniacs determined to dish out death
to foreigners.
After 22 years now in France, we've become almost inured to
tail-gaiting. It's still irritating and often downright menacing, but it
happens so often that it has lost its capacity to shock. In Corsica, though,
tail-gating is undiluted bullying. They roar up behind you and almost then
attempt to push you off the road. I found myself pulling into lay-bys
willy-nilly. Letting someone have his way was one less chance of a head-on
collision – because they will overtake with so little thought of safety that one
wonders whether the concept of danger has ever even entered their tiny minds.
One hot day (and it's hot, and dry; before it rained on the
Saturday, they'd had no rain since April), we drove to the airport in Figari to
pick up our friend from London. On the way back to base-camp half way up our
mountain, we took a look at Bonifaccio – and found it to be a little like
Rocamadour-by-Sea. That's to say, pretty damn stunning but crawling with
tourists. Like ourselves, I hasten to add. On the way home, we were rattling
along a straight stretch beside the sea, when suddenly a white BMW shot past us
and the two cars in front, then ducked back in just before driving head-on into
an oncoming lorry. I was at the controls on this stretch, so I had to leave it
to the other three to throw up their hands in horror. We then watched
open-mouthed as the driver did a 360-degree turn and sped back in the opposite
direction. We were just recovering from the shock when a black Audi overtook us
at the speed of a Looney Tunes cartoon car and vanished into the horizon.
What gives with these people? Do they simply not value their
own nor anyone else's life? I figured that we must have witnessed some sick and
obscure game of chicken – like riding the roof of a train or leaping across
alleyways from the top of one apartment block to another (which, according to
my comic of the time, The Victor, was
something that Tony Curtis did in his hoodlum youth). I secretly hoped to find
the car upturned on some rocks in a bend of the road further on, or maybe down
a cliff, Hollywood-retribution style. Some kind of poetic justice or divine
intervention, anyway, designed to hurt the transgressor and spare the innocent.
But life rarely works like that.
That was the worst we saw. Nevertheless, I didn't take any
chances after such an exhibition of highway madness. We pulled over, as I said,
and treated every blind bend with extreme caution. One thing, though, that we
continued to note was that every incident of aggression involved, naturally
enough, a male behind the wheel and, on most occasions, said male was driving a
white car, usually a BMW or an Audi. Drug money? Mafia connections? Inbreeding?
Who knows. One day, I shall do some more research – preferably online – and posit
a hypothesis for academic discussion.
Until then, I shall try to hang on to dear life by avoiding
white-van-man and white German cars. Despite the roads, we shall go back to
Corsica en famille to explore more of
the island's astonishing beauty. George Clooney, apparently, has toured the
island with a friend on a motorbike. I for one shall not be following suit.
Four wheels, bad; two wheels, even worse.
