From a pile of old newspaper cuttings recently, I dug out one about an enraged elephant attacking a car after the driver honked the horn at him.
It was in Mozambique, and the young bull elephant was one of a group blocking a road when the driver – probably a tourist – decided that blowing the horn loudly might resolve the traffic jam.
It did, in a way. First, the bull elephant reacted as many bull humans do when honked at: it honked back. Or “trumpeted”, to use the technical term for the noise elephants make.
But that was just a preliminary. Infuriated by the sound of the horn, the elephant then attacked the small car, flipping it over several times like a toy. The occupant survived somehow, bruised and shaken.
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I remembered the story last week while sitting in the passenger seat of a Toyota Yaris being driven by my son as part of his preparation for a driving test.
He had a dozen or so official lessons behind him, but those were in an instructor’s vehicle, whereas this one was new to him. He struggled at first with the unfamiliar clutch, especially when trying to find the biting point between stationary and first gear.
In the process, the car cut out a lot. And when it did, often, we were at a traffic light with a short green, or somewhere equally in the way of impatient others.
But we had L plates displayed front and back, so that anyone we impeded must have known this was a learner situation.
Despite which, constantly, people honked horns. Some were long, angry honks. Others short, slightly annoyed ones. Once, an impatient driver shot past us to catch the light in a late state of orange. Even then he thought fit to add a small honk of protest to the record.
[ A nicer kind of riot – Frank McNally on the Irish cultural storming of Paris Opens in new window ]
None of which, of course, helped the learner to avoid cut-outs, although he got there anyway by the end.
In the meantime, I was appalled by the sheer, rudeness of so many drivers. Not that it should have been any surprise to someone like me, who cycles more often than he drives in Dublin these days.
One of the welcome side effects of the autonomous car revolution, it has occurred to me since, is that horns will be silenced forever. Or so one must presume.
As hyper-intelligent vehicles negotiate their way around each other without ever losing their tempers, there will be no need for honking any more.
That may still be some way off, however. In the meantime, with my cycling hat on (or even without one), I still live in the romantic hope of seeing one last innovation for human-propelled vehicles in these, their dying days.
That would be the inclusion at last, as standard, of car horns that sound as loud inside the vehicle as they do out.
[ Frank McNally on Britain’s perennial problem with Irish women’s namesOpens in new window ]
Yes, like all innovations, it would pose risks early on. The first drivers to blast their horns angrily might themselves hit the roof in alarm at the sound. But they’d learn quickly not to do it again, except maybe in emergencies.
The other thing I still like to fantasise about is a car-horn tax. Now that smart vehicles are monitoring every aspect of a driver’s performance, they could also surely keep track of excessive horn usage and pass on details to Revenue in an end-of-year return.
Of course, drivers would get a tax-free allowance of so many honks a year. And vehicle monitors would be able to distinguish between big, angry honks and short, friendly ones when, say, recognising a friend along the road.
There would also be a right of appeal, and you could plead special circumstances for occasional orgies of horn use, such as being a Mayo GAA supporter in an attempted cavalcade that turned into a traffic jam on a one-way street in Westport last July.
Perhaps, in the twilight of human-driven cars, horns might just become less aggressive-sounding. Maybe they could also be personalised, like number plates. This used to happen, in fact, back when drivers had more of a sense of humour than they seem to have today.
In that same pile of cuttings, alongside the elephant story, I found an exchange of letters about car horns in an English newspaper. One writer had called for an alternative to the traditional loud honk, suggesting instead something equivalent to “a vehicular polite cough”.
Another correspondent agreed but went one better, arguing for a musical solution. His first car, a 1947 sports saloon, had had “two horns tuned to a major third that gave a lovely melodic note and pierced background noises”, he wrote.
That would be nice too, even if the risks might include having some eejit behind you at a traffic light blasting the opening notes of Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony every time you miss the green.
