Ian McMillan: The street clowns with a window of opportunity

The pollution, caused by all the cars and vans and trucks and buses, was the worst thing though; it made you gasp like a hake on a slab. As I got off the plane I felt my chest tighten and my eyes water. I kept having to clear my throat before I could speak, and after a couple of hours my head began to throb. “You’ll get used to it,” Hector said, with his fetching lisp. To be honest, Hector, I didn’t want to get used to it.

Some of the memories of my Mexico trip are hazy now (did I really eat grasshoppers? Did I really ride a horse?) but I vividly remember that car, and Hector slowing down as we approached traffic lights and a colourful carnival exploding into the queue of waiting vehicles.

In this country when you’re sitting at a red light in a city, somebody will sometimes come and try and sell you a newspaper or wash your windscreen. In Mexico City, each junction was a combination of arts festival, street market and doctor’s waiting room. It was exhilarating and a little frightening.

Kids with Pan Pipes would caper in front of the car until they were elbowed away by a strongman who tore telephone books in half. A man in an unfeasibly large hat would bang on the passenger window and grin, showing teeth like rotten tree stumps as he tried to sell you a glass copy of an Aztec Pyramid (I bought one: it sits glinting on the bookshelf as I write this) while his mate banged on the driver’s window to sell street maps that looked suspiciously like they were for a different city: I’m sure I saw Paris at least twice, and Rome once. A man in a George Bush mask had a comedy wrestling match with a man in a Tony Blair mask, and tiny children in rags simply stood with their palms raised and their eyes wide. It wasn’t much like waiting to get onto the main road in Darfield, believe me.

Then there were the clowns; they were dressed in traditional red-nose-big-shoes-daft-hat gear and they acted out what appeared to be hugely complex and melodramatic road-safety mimes. One of them would try to run into the road and another one would try and stop him, losing his hat in the process. Another one would admonish the runner and kick him up the bum. Another one would run out and pretend that he’d been hit by a car and the others would gather him up and carry him away, pretending to weep. I was always disappointed when the lights change and we had to leave the drama, and once I tried to get Hector to wait to see what happened at the end but you don’t wait in Mexico City.

I was thinking about those clowns the other day when I was listening to yet another driver moaning about speed cameras. You know the kind of moan I mean: it’s always delivered in a “Look what they’ve done now” tone of voice, as though the poor speeding driver is some kind of victim rather than a law-breaker.

The moan always contains the same ingredients: “They’re squeezing the poor driver dry/I’m a safe driver, it’s the other idiots you have to watch for/driving slowly is more dangerous than driving quickly (I know, that’s just the stupid side of surreal)/the speed limits don’t take into account how safe cars are these days”.

I have to declare an interest here, or rather a non-interest, because I can’t drive and I’ve no intention of learning. A poet in charge of tons of metal? No thanks, I’ll stick to my rhymes.

The fact is, though, that people ignore speed limits, and the fact is that if you hit a pedestrian the slower you’re going the more chance that person has of surviving the impact with your newly-polished car bonnet.

So maybe we should get people to act out some of those road safety dramas round here. Dress them up as clowns and get them to leap out from behind speed cameras to perform a grisly show about what happens when you drive too fast. If they time it right and you’re doing the right speed the clowns will be in no danger; of course if you’re going too fast there’s danger of red nose loss and comedy shoe injury but then that’s up to the driver.

Maybe these plays will have an impact; maybe they’ll make a driver think, maybe they’ll make a driver slow down a little. I reckon it’s worth a try, don’t you? Of course it might distract the driver from their texting, but that’s another play altogether.