We're forever being told that distracted driving kills.
We're told that if you take your eyes off the road for a second, you'll die horribly mangled in a seventy-four car pile-up, and that those who let their attention drift should be punished and fined to raise money for more speed cameras.
We all know that if you're a good driver, you should be able to drink a can of coke at the wheel without careering off the road into a group of schoolchildren; however, there is a limit to this laissez-faire attitude. Playing Monopoly behind the wheel, for example, is a definite no-no.
So, to help keep you safe on the road, we've prepared a handy cut-out-'n'-keep (or whatever the interweb equivalent of cut-out-'n'-keep is) guide to distracted driving.
Eating & Drinking
Eating or drinking in moderation is fine. A bag of crisps? Go for it. A packet of Haribo? Lovely. However, you can stretch this concept too far; for example, tucking into a roast dinner on the M6 might be regarded as reckless, not to mention delicious. I, for one, once drove from Birmingham to Oxford while enjoying a Lobster Thermidor and it's not an experience I would recommend -- I didn't have any hands free to open my can of lager.
Children
A screaming child is enough to drive a perfectly sane individual to the brink of complete insanity. If you must take a baby in a car with you, sedate it beforehand. Or put it in the roof-box.
Phones
We're not sure that using a mobile phone actually lowers the standard of your driving; it might just be that the sort of prat who tries to send a tweet at the wheel is fundamentally incapable of driving sensibly.
Billboards
Apparently, because of the 'Hello Boys' Wonderbra campaign, the lovely Eva Herzigova (pictured above) is responsible for more loss of human life than Stalin. Fact.*
Scantily clad women on the pavement
Same as above, but even more distracting. If the government was serious about cutting road deaths, they'd make the burka mandatory.
Reading a map
Today's sat-navs have rendered the good ol' fashioned road map all but obsolete. Which is a good thing, as reading an A3-sized road atlas while driving is harder than trying to solve Fermat's Last Theorem while bungee jumping into an active volcano.
Accidents
Gawping at accidents -- or rubber-necking, as it's widely known -- is poor form, but fully understandable. After all, by our very nature, we're a curious species and if some poor soul has reduced his Vectra to its component parts on the A3, we're going to want to catch a glimpse. However, what is emphatically not okay is the current trend for drivers to slow down and take pictures of the wreckage on their phones -- you've got to be a bit of a sicko to want to photograph a car accident for posterity.
Smoking
Have you ever tried to light a cigarette in a car with a lighter which won't spark? When you're focussing your attention three inches in front of your face, you're unlikely to spot the Polish juggernaut heading towards you on the wrong side of the motorway. Not good.
Putting lipstick on
My colleague Laura Reader can drive her Lotus Elise at twice the speed of light while putting her lippy on. Mine, however, always looks messy.
Changing music
With a six-CD auto-changer, this can be really tricky; with an iPod, even trickier. The best option is to sort out a playlist before you set off, but has anyone in the history of human-kind ever bothered to do this?
*Not really
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