You can call it reckless, but it's something more emphatic and anti-social than that; it's "to hell with the lot of you, to hell with all regulations. They don't affect me." That is the fellow with the left hand holding the mobile phone to his ear while pulling out from a line of cars to pass them on a narrow country road - all five of them. It is also the fellow - or woman - who, where there is on the Navan-Kells road a vivid, large series of notices telling you that there is no passing for several kilometres, pulls out and passes you. The signs can't be missed. Huge structures in red and black and white, with a pair of cars depicted for any who might be unable to read at speed. The first time a friend approached this long line of warnings, a big car swept past him - on the wrong side of the road, of course - clipping the grass and weeds, and was soon out of sight. The second time he was on this course, he was followed by a small car which waited for a narrow, winding stretch before passing. Nor was drink a likely cause in either case. It was a Sunday, pre-lunchtime. The French have a different problem or another version of to-hell-with-it-all: death by tree. There has been argument in more than one part of France about the danger posed by those wonderful lines of trees which you find on so many roads in that country. It's as if, in the eyes of some people, the trees were attacking innocent motorcars. An article in the London Independent on Sunday makes the point. You know these trees, mostly plane trees with their mottled bark, brilliant in the sunshine, reassuring by night - or should be.
And while many of us thought they were of Napoleonic origin, this article affirms that in many cases they are of much earlier origin. And these platanes, we are told, can live for 300 years and can resist hurricanes. "Drive your car into one and you might as well be hitting a stone bridge." Some say that more big roads should be built and the old ones left as a sort of national monument. Others claim, in the same spirit, that if young, drinking drivers don't kill themselves against trees, they will do so against other cars. Down in the Department of Pyrenees Orientales, the course was taken in one place of leaving the trees on one side and felling the other side, and broadening the road there. Certainly, if they are to be felled on a big scale, France will have lost a part of its history and some of its appeal to tourists, though it is a big country with much to give and delight.