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RIDDLE: Why did the Hertz car go back to the rental lot after two and a half weeks - with only 13 miles on it?

ANSWER: The driver was afraid to drive on the left!

Don't look at me. I didn't rent that car. It was my seat partner on the Air Canada flight back to Montreal from London. I was relieved to find a driver more cowardly than I. Compared to him, I had been valorous and daring.

Perhaps it was the free airline beer that kept flowing in his
direction, and the assurance that those loopy, confounding roundabouts were miles below us, that made for the confessional tone of our conversation. But this young Launch Command Equipment engineer who flew between Ottawa and London every month for the Canadian National Defense Department, admitted to me that the longest distance he'd ever dared to drive on the left was between his hotel at Heathrow Airport and the nearest pub. He was mildly traumatized by the experienced. He kept accidentally opening the car door when he went to shift gears. He'd clipped a few hedgerows. Leaped a few sidewalks. And how he hated the roundabouts!

"I'd rather walk a few miles to get to where I need to go, than
have to go round and round and round on those blasted @*!#*>! things" Captain J.A. Hampson blurtled.

Roundabouts indeed. What a cockamamie way to organize a
highway system, with spigots of roads sticking out in all directions from a traffic circle. The North American driver's instinct is always to look to the left when entering a roundabout - but the onslaught of oncoming traffic is always coming from the right ! And before you get onto the roundabout, you have only a nanosecond to figure out which lane? When? And how? And where - to get off the thing.

I can still hear my friend Suzanna's incongruously chipper
voice: "C'mon Nance, let's go around it one more time. We'll drive those other drivers crazy, but let's just keep going around and around until you feel ready to get off."

The problem was, I knew I was never going to feel ready to get off, any more than I'd ever feel ready to bale out of a plane in a parachute. My rental car's rear view mirror was on backwards. The highway signs were on the wrong side of the road. Cars were whizzing around me in unpredictable directions. My cross-circuited left and right brains were blowing a fuse. I was looking up, down, left, right, backwards and forwards and feeling so dizzy I wanted to cry. I coughed to muffle a big sob.

My old Indiana University roommate Suzanna, now a fast-lane
London international banker, was trying to prepare me to get on and off the M 25 beltway around London, so that the next morning I could drive from her house in Cobham, Surrey, to Tintagel, on the tip of Cornwall, ostensibly to explore King Arthur Country. The butterflies I'd felt, looking down at these diabolical circles from the window of the Boeing 747 the morning before, were nothing compared to the giant Luna moths flapping around my abdomen now. Finally, after going around the roundabout 12 times - she counted them - I zinged off onto the exit lane, and pulled over in a sweat. Suzanna silently took the wheel.

That night I lay awake repeating my new mantras - "Traffic on
your right"... "Curb on Your Left" ... "Wide Right" ... "Short Left" - and reciting Her Royal Majesty's "The Highway Code." I put the 76-page booklet of rules and procedures under my pillow, hoping that the dual carriageway lane markings, diagonal stripes, box junctions, and zebra controlled areas would imprint themselves on my brain as I slept. But alas, I did not sleep.

"How'd you do on the M25?" Captain Hampson asked me. "My first and last time on it," he said pouring another Molson's, "I bumped someone off onto the exit ramp, and made him go miles out of his way. It wasn't very British of him, but he honked and showed me one of his fingers."

"Hmmm. Well " I said blankly, searching for some detailed
recall. "I got on. I got off. The in-between's a big blur....”

In fact, my drive from London to the tip of Cornwall and back
was a total blank, as if I'd done it in an altered state of consciousness. I remember walking around Stonehenge in the freezing rain. I remember climbing to the top of the Glastonbury Tor with the wind screaming through the ruins of the 14th century monastery tower of St. Michael the Dragon Slayer. And I vividly recall the trek up the slippery damp stones to the ruins of Tintagel Castle on a jagged headland high over the lashing Atlantic. But I don't remember how I got to any of these places.

Captain Hampson and I agreed how ridiculous it was that the
world should be divided into right and left-brained drivers. About three-quarters of the world drives on the right, and only one-quarter, mostly countries that were once British colonies, drives on the left.

Actually riding and walking on the left was popular until the French Revolution, when Napoleon decreed that people, horses, and carriages in continental Europe switch to the right. Travelling on the left was suddenly considered barbaric, a hangover from feudal violent warring societies where lance-bearing jousting knights and sword-bearing commoners always passed each other on the side ready for defense. And when post-revolutionary U.S.adopted driving on the right, and started manufacturing right-brained cars... most of the world bought them.

This fear of driving on the wrong side of the road -"leftolobotophobia" as it's called in right-brained countries, and "rightolobotophobia" as it's called in England, Ireland, Australia, Malaysia, Japan, South Africa, Sweden, Jamaica and other countries where they drive on the left - is apparently quite widespread. It's a well known fact that humans have directional orientation deficiencies. How many times have you asked directions of someone and been astonished to see the person point left while saying "right" or point right while saying "left"? Isn't that proof? To avert airline disasters, they even make gloves for pilots to wear, marked with big R's and L's. (would sell like hotcakes at Heathrow!)

And lest we forget the Perils of Walking on the Left. Crosswalks on London and Dublin streets are painted with three-foot high letters shouting "LOOK LEFT!' However, these warnings may have little effect against jet lag, inebriation and seasickness. Montreal theatre critic Gaëtan Charlebois was almost killed three times on his first evening in London after crossing the Atlantic in the old hunk-o-junk the Stefan Batory, in the fall of '81.

"It was an old passenger liner named after some Polish conqueror. We spent 8 days of the 10-day crossing tossed by force-8 gales. You could jump in the air and the boat would come up to meet you. We landed in London with the sense and reason bounced out of us by the storms. It was chaos at the dock-with taxis madly swerving to avoid tourists walking in a weave, rendered half-insane by the solidity of land and the dream-like quality of the traffic patterns. But the scariest thing was to see Canadians renting cars when they could barely walk!"

One last word. Beware of flashbacks. Once you've overcome your leftolobophobia and become bi-lateral-lobic, you may be prone to unexpected lapses. Like my friend Vicki, who drove only one week of her life in County Sligo in Ireland, and a year later left her driveway in Vermont one morning and found herself driving down a country road - on the left!

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