Our sleepy rural idyll invaded by loud, dangerous boy racers
The noise of revving and screeching on the road outside is deafening.
It sounds, as I tell someone afterwards, like a plane landing in the garden.
Then I notice a new rhythm; the powerful roaring surges and ebbs, surges and ebbs, and as I lie there, increasingly irate, I begin to realise that a boy racer car is breaking down; it’s giving up the ghost and the furious, impatient driver is stamping on the pedal, whipping his dying horse into one last, desperate rodeo.
And I am feeling no sympathy whatsoever.
This was the third night in a row they had been screaming up and down our road. Thursday night. Friday night. Saturday night, and now, in the very first minutes of Sunday, here they were again.
We’ve begun to recognise the sound of the first vehicle screaming up the road of an evening. Why wouldn’t we - we’ve been listening to it for weeks.
One thing I do know; one of these days that guy or one of his friends is perhaps going to lose control and slam into a garden wall.
I’m fed up of it. I lie there hoping his bloody car really is on its last bloody legs.
I listen as the vehicle limps off down the road, stopping and starting and going from a strangled, thunderous roar to splat and back again.
I wonder if he’ll get it fixed in time to start tearing around the circuit again tonight.
Because that’s what we and many other houses in this otherwise quiet country neighbourhood, and many other rural neighbourhoods, are now, apparently.
A boy-racer circuit.
There’s no point trying to go back to sleep. I’m just going to be jerked awake again.
So I lie there; by now it’s one o’clock in the morning and I’m waiting for the aggressive, high screeching of engines as they race past our gate just doin’ their thang.
Eventually - and the last time I look at the clock it’s past three - I doze off.
But that’s not the end of it. Not by a long shot.
The racing boys are at it again.
Their clarion call: the sound of screeching, stretched tyres. Stretched tyres are tyres which have been ‘stretched’ over wheels or alloys that are slightly bigger than the correct tyre size for the car, leaving the tyre more vulnerable to punctures and damage and lessening their grip on the road, thereby increasing the risk to other road s.
Their clarion call: the sound of thunderous exhausts which have been cut, bent or had holes punched into them to make them louder.
Their clarion call: very loud.
I think about all the people driving along with their kids in the back of the car, and cheery red-and-white flags hanging out their windows, ahead of that day’s all-Ireland Senior Hurling Championship Final between Cork and Clare.
Dear Jesus.
It’s been very bad this week, I tell a friend.
This time it was Thursday night through to the Sunday. We’re plagued.
You could nearly tell the time by the sound of that evening’s outriders screeching up and down the road, ripping the peace and quiet to shreds.
It was a full moon last night, too, I nearly say, but don’t. Seriously, though, you can see the doughnuts scorched into the crossroads all around us.
Thing is, though, maybe it’s time to bite the bullet on boy racers and their heavily-modified cars.
Give these wilful, tyrannical youths a big space, somewhere that offers something along the lines of Mondello Park in Kildare. Somewhere well away from quiet village streets, sleeping families, country roads and rural crossroads.
Somewhere they can burn rubber.
Somewhere with a few nice big slabs of concrete to do their doughnuts on.
A boy-racer-club-type-thing that gets them off the public roads.
We fear, hate and resent the hazards they pose to themselves and others, the speeding, the noise, the times they pick.
They’re a menace, and we need to get on top of it.
First, though, we possibly need to recognise the fact that these are simply young car enthusiasts who need somewhere to meet, talk about their ion and hone their driving skills - before they kill us and kill themselves.
And maybe we should just go with that.
App?
