Dialogue: A case of crash test dummies

Gut-felt, reflex shrieks of alarm went up among my female friends when I set off for Motat to catch the final hours of the interactive road-safety exhibition.

The poor women almost tried to nail me to the wall to save me from myself.

We women absolutely hate the idea of car and transport museums, so much so that we cannot relax if we know that one of our number has wandered near one.

Still, I kind of like poking around road-safety exhibitions.

It's the sheer, energetic hopelessness of them that I find so loveable - the dogged, never-say-die belief that it is somehow possible to make people behave better than they do elsewhere when they get behind the wheel of a car.

I have been thinking about this a lot lately, in the face of recent, male outrage at proposals to fine those who break the speed limit, as opposed to those who break it in a big way. Can someone tell me why the average bloke considers driving at 50 km/h synonymous with impotence?

Where was I? Ah yes, the exhibition. Well, the whole sorry deal was excellent testimony - as if we needed more - to lost values, screwed priorities, missed ironies and (this last inevitably brings up the rear these days) a rather unfortunate, and thus comic, sense of timing.

It was exactly the kind of exhibit that well-minded people put on when they're going down for the third time and know that everyone else lost interest after the first.

It smacked, alas, of a sort of harried lack of attention to detail. The results were so outrageous I wandered around in a daze.

For instance, the first exhibit I nearly fell into was a full-sized coffin covered in beer bottles.

Nothing wrong with that, except that the coffin was juxtaposed with a sign that asked patrons to take their own drinks no further. Alas, the coffin was starting to look like a cheap prop in a bottle-drive.

Sometimes, I wonder how anybody manages to learn anything.

The same thing went for the car-crash exhibit. In this, the front half of a wrecked small car was affixed to the wall. The car had obviously met with another at a powerful speed. Its fender was mangled, the bonnet crushed, wheels splayed and so on. It was one of those big, happily non-fatal, rear-ending jobs that finally wakes you up to yourself after one too many evenings tailgating.

Unfortunately, again, the impact of this potentially stunning piece was lost. It was lost because the piece was flanked not by pictures of ambulances or signs warning against speed, but by a sign advertising a car-repair company.

True story, this. I'm sure I didn't dream it. I don't think I could have. There was a wrecked car and a sign warning you of the evils of overpriced repairs.

Perhaps there was some sort of ironic, historical, sequential reference in there somewhere, but if there was, I missed it. (Got the name of the car-repair people, though. The panelbeaters you get out of the phone book are bandits.)

Anyway, on we went. The punters were totally priceless. They were all male, too, although I hate to appear sexist and would not normally engage in such a generalisation if the facts did not bear me out in every way. And the facts are that blokes like a bit of action.

It's not an inadequacy, it's a calling.

It starts quite young, too. There was, for instance, a small, rather insane-looking male child riding a pink scooter who kept trying to run over his sister (clearly the scooter's hapless original owner) after running into the coffin, the repair advertisement and the mocked-up red light that was set up at the end of a ramp. He kept doing it and she kept taking it - an old theme, perhaps, but one that is obviously in the DNA.

Another little boy raced up to the safe-overtaking interactive display, took the controls and started pointing trucks into boulders and other trucks.

Then there was father and son scoring as many hits as possible on the Avoid the Pedestrian display.

"I hit that kid every time," cried Dad, as he and his son ploughed through the digitised populace.

Maybe it's just me.