The car horn, that humble little device in the middle of your steering wheel.

 It sits there discreetly, recognisable only by the old fashioned squeaker horn icon marking the spot waiting for its moment to be used and time to shine as quoted by the highway code, for warning other road users of your cars presence or approach or to call attention to a hazard that might be a danger to everybody and  not just yourselves.

It must never be used to show annoyance say all the rule books however I’m pretty sure a lot of people are skipping that page because as far as I can tell that’s more or less what it’s being used for implicitly.

As you know I’m new to this driving lark so I can understand that sometimes my mishaps like stalling the car at junctions can be to the more experienced road user a little irksome when they are trying to go somewhere and in incidents where I have made a bad judgement error, you know what I hold my hands up to it that sometimes the honking is more than justified.

However  in the less serious situations as I sit there trying to keep calm and rectify the situation as quickly as I can I don’t know about the rest of  you but there’s something about having a loud noise blasted repeatedly at you that really puts you off your concentration train.

Recently I was followed all the way down City Way in Rochester by a taxi driver using his horn for the sole purpose to express his annoyance at me not pulling away quick enough for his liking and I saw a similar situation whilst walking past the school run on Walderslade Road last week as someone angrily beeped their horn at the person in front and bellowed MOVE in slightly less polite terms than I have stated.

So on reading the story that car horns are to be redesigned by scientists to sound more like duck quacks I had to laugh because I’m pretty sure these obnoxious specimens on the road will seem a lot less intimidating if they sound less like a foghorn and more like a slightly irritated mallard.