@mungo1972 398157 wrote:
Do you remember that story a few years ago about an oap driving a mobility car down the motorway !!!!! , do you think she may have got that feeling ….” yes i shouldnt be here , knew i shouldnt have taken that last turn but shit i have no reverse so balls to walls lets see what this mini milk float can do ” .
this happens regularly on the A12 and A14 trunk roads. The most recent old boy in Essex to do so was a bit drunk and thus earned himself a Section 59 warning (they had to do a full rolling roadblock on him) :laugh_at:
most of the time they are on the hard shoulder or equivalent on a non-motorway road and end up there due to dementia and confusion – simply forgetting what era they are in and some of these roads were less busy than town centre traffic in the early 20th century as less people have cars. these people are in fact treated fairly leniently by the authorities – as is the granny who genuinely forgets to pay for her shopping…
I work for some old peoples care facilities (in IT and telecoms) and we get people who grew up in Mid Suffolk trying to get their calls operator connected still as they have forgotten you have to dial numbers yourself (some Suffolk exchanges were not automatic until the 1970s!) – for these people we set up those phones with giant numbers and big memory buttons with photos etc.
however that shouldn’t excuse some of the really nasty violent behaviour that the older generation are now becoming capable of, particularly domestic violence, abuse of carers and NHS staff etc.
A lot of this even goes unpunished / unreported or is explained away by various “medical conditions”.
I’ve not even put up the really nasty stories from this region alone of dirty old men being found with fuckloads of innapropriate sexual material (such as that headmaster what got sent down recently). a lot of these scum actually often committed their crimes when they were younger, but have got used to getting away with it.
its of course not the case every OAP is a unpunished criminal, but the numbers are worse in EA because older people make up a much larger part of the population than London or Manchester…. in other countries there are wider social problems, especially those what got hammered worse by WW II – the war didn’t end in peoples minds after VE day (there’s a strong argument that it never ends in the minds of those who have experienced it – todays young generation will be affected by todays war when they are older!
The only bright side here is that a combination of changing attitudes and modern surveillance technology mean they are being brought to judgement and justice even if its in their final years…
