The only way is… out of Essex, quickly

There is a common perception about ‘that London’ throughout the country as the most hectic, busy and annoying city to travel around. It is full of whizzing cars, rammed Tubes and jam-packed buses. In short, from a transport perspective, the place is ruddy hell on earth.

So, you would expect the capital to be the, well, capital of ‘amber gamblers’, or, as they are otherwise known, idiots jumping traffic lights. Not so. In fact, it isn’t Birmingham. Or Manchester. Or Liverpool.

No, it’s Chelmsford in Essex. Now, I don’t really know what Chelmsford is like, but sources inside Surveyor Towers assure me it isn’t really ‘that Essex’, as in, you aren’t likely to see anyone filming an ITV2 documentary about permatanned bimbos and lads.

So, who are the speeders? Apparently, 27% said they were ‘in a rush to get work’, and 33% claimed they did not have to stop.

Another local source said: ‘I know two doctors who live in Chelmsford…’ Take of that what you will.

Hairy bikers monkeying around

It’s hard to get people to care about road safety sometimes. Good grief, the governments of Britain have certainly tried over the years. How many adverts featuring animals do we need to cross a road? The answer would be several dozen, apparently.

It would appear the UK Government isn’t the only one which has enlisted creatures as a way to get people to think about road safety.

But the Thai Government didn’t use a tortoise or some kind of small farmyard animal. No, it opted for an orang-utan.

In a bizarre, and no doubt cruel, act, a helmet-wearning orang-utan has been taught to ride a bike through a crowd at Dusit Zoo in Bangkok. The country had 559 road accidents a day last year.

The hope, Highwayman guesses, is to stop all the monkeying around…