Brace yourselves, gentle readers, for another instalment in the ongoing saga of 'What Fresh Hell is This?' Our scene opens in... well, somewhere in Italy, where a motorist has apparently decided that the pedestrian crossing was merely a suggestion, and that eight innocent souls were just begging to be acquainted with his bumper.
News reaches us that the Metropolitan Police's counter-terrorism division are 'monitoring' the situation with the same concerned furrow they'd give a slightly overdone roast dinner. Because, as we all know, when a Fiat goes rogue, it's only a matter of time before the entire scaffolding of European security comes tumbling down around our ears. I can picture them now, in a dimly lit room in Scotland Yard, staring at a map of Europe and muttering, 'This is how it begins.
First a car in Italy, then a scooter in Spain, and before you know it, we're all speaking German and eating nothing but sauerkraut.' The audacity, the sheer effrontery of a man using a motor vehicle for its intended purpose of transportation, albeit with a rather more direct route through a crowd. We are, it seems, living in an age where every minor traffic violation is a potential harbinger of the apocalypse.
The injured, we are told, are being treated. One can only hope they are also being served a stiff drink and a good dose of perspective. For in this febrile atmosphere, where every bump and scrape is a 'security crisis', we must ask ourselves: are we not all just statistics waiting for our own personal Fiat to come careening out of the blue?
Or, as I suspect, is this just a taster for the main course of nonsense that awaits us tomorrow?
