Baby collides with car

A six-month-old baby has been airlifted to hospital in a critical condition after a zebra crossing crash in Brentwood, Essex.

The mother was walking across the pedestrian crossing on Ongar Road at its junction with Doddinghurst Road, when the pushchair containing her baby was in collision with a silver Volkswagen Polo at 11.05am this morning.

The driver was a 75-year-old woman (i.e. one of those elderly drivers whose fitness to drive has to be verified only by the driver).

On another site someone comments:

Ongar Road is a deathtrap full of moronic speeding drivers at the best of times, but you think you'd be safe on a crossing in broad daylight wouldn't you.

(No, I wouldn’t think that at all.)

Meanwhile the Telegraph is outraged by this case of parking warden persecution:

Mr Cadwallader, 87, had left his car in a disabled bay with the blue badge in the windscreen while he went to play his weekly game of bridge in Woodbridge, Suffolk. But the retired headmaster returned to find that a parking warden had issued him a £40 penalty because the writing on his permit had been bleached by the sun.

Mr Cadwallader, who has suffered three heart attacks and a stroke

WHAT? Why is this man allowed to be in control of a moving ton of metal?

In no other aspect of our society would an 87 year old in this condition be allowed to operate dangerous machinery.