Interesting story from a colleague at lunchtime. His son — a young man — was driving in London for the first time. While stopped at a traffic light, he consulted a map on his smartphone. When the lights changed, he put the phone on the seat beside him and drove off — only to find himself being pursued by a police car with lights flashing. He pulls over and Constable Plod sucks his pencil and informs him that, under the Road Traffic Act 1988, Sections 2 & 3 and Construction & Use Regulations, Regulation 104 and 110, he has committed an offence. The punishment: £60 file and three penalty points on his licence — which, given that he is a young man, can be seriously damaging to his prospects of being able to rent a car.

He wasn’t, of course, using his phone as a phone but as a data device that happens to be able to display maps. And his car was stationary at the time, while he waited for the traffic-lights to change. But, according to Law on The Web,

The term “driving” has a very wide definition in motoring law matters. You can generally still be considered to be driving, even if you are stationary, sitting in your vehicle off the road, but with your engine running. Turning off your engine may be enough to prevent a successful prosecution.

If you are stuck in a traffic jam, then again you are still driving your car as far the police are concerned and you open up yourself to prosecution if you use your mobile phone other than through a hands-free kit. Every case is different and it is very difficult to lay down hard and fast guidelines.
Using a mobile phone

Most policemen believe that if they see you with your mobile phone or PDA in your hand while driving your car, then you have committed the offence of using a mobile phone while driving.

For there to be “use” of the phone there has to be some form of interaction with the device – so looking to see who is calling, or looking up a number, or dialling a number, as well as, of course, speaking or texting someone with it.

So far so bad (or good, depending on your point of view). It gets interesting when you ask whether the lad would have been prosecuted if he had been engaged in jabbing a postcode into a TomTom sat-nav device? The answer, apparently, is no. Why? Because the TomTom is not a phone.

But then, asked Quentin (who was also at lunch), what happens if — as Q does — you happen to have the TomTom app installed on your iPhone?

It’s gets murkier and murkier, the more you think about it. For example, it would be ok to use an iPad, because that isn’t a phone (even though you can put a SIM card into it and use it for mobile data), but not a Samsung Galaxy Tab, which happens to be able to make phone calls.

See here for details.

Lovely celebration of Flann O’Brien by Roger Boylan.

He finished “At Swim-Two-Birds” when he was 28 and sent it off to Longmans, a London publisher, where by a rare stroke of good luck Graham Greene was reader. “I read it with continual excitement, amusement and the kind of glee one experiences when people smash china on the stage,” recalled Greene, who urged publication. From Paris, James Joyce, in a blurb written to help promote the book, pronounced its author “a real writer, with the true comic spirit.” O’Nolan was cautiously optimistic. But the cosmic balance was soon restored. War broke out and in 1940 the Luftwaffe destroyed the London warehouse in which the entire print run of the novel was stored; fewer than 250 had been sold. Then in 1941 Joyce, who had promised to help with publicity, suddenly died, along with O’Nolan’s hopes for the book. “[I]t must be a flop,” he wrote, wallowing in gloom. “I guess it is a bum book anyhow.”

In fact, it’s every bit the masterpiece Greene said it was—a thrilling mix of wild experimentation and traditional Irish storytelling. Stylistically, “At Swim-Two-Birds” runs the gamut from mock-epic … to a kind of arch naturalism… The narrative is divided into three parts, described with admiration by Jorge Luis Borges: “A student in Dublin writes a novel about the proprietor of a Dublin public house, who writes a novel about the habitués of his pub (among them, the student), who in their turn write novels in which proprietor and student figure along with other writers about other novelists.” It’s an intricate puzzle played for laughs, a novel simultaneously subversive of, and reverent towards, the Irish epic tradition. It was ten years before the Luftwaffe’s draconian edits were reversed and the book was reprinted…

On a whim, we went to see Woody Allen’s latest film last night — and enjoyed it immensely. The trailer doesn’t do it justice: it’s clever, witty, subtle and occasionally outrageously funny. And it has a lovely sting in the tail. In some ways, it feels like a return to Allen at the top of his 1970s form. The only thing that’s changed is that instead of Allen himself playing the angst-ridden intellectual who can’t quite manage a full-on relationship with a sexy woman, we have Owen Wilson, broken nose and all, playing that role as Gil Pender, a successful hack screenwriter who really wants to be a great novelist. But here’s the weird thing: Wilson sounds and acts exactly like Allen.

The film also revealed how unobservant I am. At one stage there’s a scene in which the main characters are in the Rodin museum listening to a French guide expounding on the sculptor’s life. As I watched, I thought: there’s something very familiar about that guide. I’m sure I’ve seen her somewhere before. It was only afterwards that I realised she is Carla Bruni, now France’s First Lady. Which left me marvelling at Allen’s cunning: what a way to ensure that filming in Paris is free from hassling by officialdom.

We watched it in a Cambridge cinema with an audience that clearly got the literary jokes: the wonderful send-up of Hemingway (brilliantly played by Corey Stoll), for example. Or the lovely joke about Bunuel in which the Allen figure gives the great director a suggestion for the plot of his most famous film — and Bunuel doesn’t get it! Adrien Brody’s portrayal of Salvador Dali at full throttle is side-splittingly funny. But in some places the film also gets serious things right: for example, the way Kathy Bates captures Gertrude Stein’s rock-solid dependability.

I left, still grinning at the lovely closing twist and making two resolutions: (a) to have a few days in Paris this Autumn; and (b) to read Gertrude Stein.

In his New Yorker review, David Denby describes the film as

a gently rapt fable, caressed with wonderment. Gil is a stumbling contemporary neurotic thrown in among artists with seemingly dauntless strength. It’s his trip, but it’s Allen’s, too—a dream curated by the fan of great musicians and writers, the culture-mad student, always renewing the pantheon.

He’s right. My verdict: unmissable.

From an email circulating on the Net. Thanks to Douglas for forwarding it.