31 July—So far this year, there have been 11 wrong-way crashes on Connecticut divided highways, resulting in 20 deaths. That’s over twice the annual cadaver count of the previous three years. So, in an heroic effort to reduce the wrong-way carnage, the state on Friday approved bonding (i.e., borrowing with rising interest) $20 million to pay for cameras in or on wrong-way signs that are meant to trigger flashing lights when a vehicle going the wrong way is detected.

Great idea. Except it’s not. Any surprise that 80 percent of the wrong-way mayhem is caused by drunk or otherwise substance-impaired drivers? My reasoning may be somewhat simplistic here, but if the drivers are too impaired to read or heed wrong-way signs, do the geniuses in Hartford and Newington (Connecticut Dept. of Transportation headquarters) really think they’d notice flashing lights, let alone have any idea what the lights meant? Even if “WRONG WAY!” came out and bit them?

Of course, the always reliable Connecticut State Police have already allegedly increased their patrols and undertaken other unspecified enforcement activities to deal with the problem. Yeah, right, and wow! That’s assuming Connecticut’s finest aren’t themselves impaired by alcohol or some other substance. Or lassitude.

Reminds me of my own wrong-way experience. Some six decades ago, my first peregrination in the British Isles. In Scotland, Gretna Green, to be exact. And no, I wasn’t there to marry an underage girl. I was underage myself, of course. Three decades on, been there, done that, and I’m still too young to be married.

From the mid-18^th century, English parents of boys and girls under 21 could object to their children’s marriage. In Scotland, however, boys could take the reckless connubial plunge at 14 and girls at 12 without parental consent. Gretna Green was and still is on the English-Scottish border. So if the oversexed adolescents couldn’t think it over and control their hormones, Gretna Green was their destination. In the old days, anyway.

Back to Wrong-Way Rosenberg. First time I drove up to Scotland, I was able to make it through the English border guards, who were reluctant to allow me to cross over into the northern wilderness—for my own safety, of course. They let me know in no uncertain terms that I should have turned back at Hadrian’s Wall. But flashing an American passport was pretty effective in those days. And a couple of rolls of American toilet paper I had abstracted from our embassy in London convinced the guards to raise the barrier.

(That beautiful Saarinen brutalist building on Grosvenor Square is now being converted to an ultra-luxury hotel, by the way. The new American embassy on the South Bank is a monstrosity, like most modern architecture in the UK. The Royal Institute of British Architects must have an annual competition for the ugliest building.)

Back at Gretna Green, then, it wasn’t so easy for me to get the Scottish border guards to let me cross into what one of them called “dùthaich Dhè fèin.” For starters, they were wearing skirts and insisted on demonstrating the regimental mode. I was unimpressed. Even worse, their English was broken at best and I was even less fluent in Scots Gaelic then than I am now. The border guards certainly appreciated that my bona fides (i.e., American passport and U.S. dollars) proved that I wasn’t a Sassenach. But Yankee bog scroll meant nothing to them. They preferred wax paper. Of which I didn’t have any. But I did have some melted chocolate bars.

So I was now in Scotland. Negotiating the Großglockner Pass in Austria, past all those abject broken-down tourists with burned-out brakes, was easier than getting into Scotland through Gretna Green. But I had done it! Once I was in dùthaich Dhè fèin, however, I was presented with a new challenge: a dual carriageway that had only just been opened.

A dual carriageway is what we on the right side of the great pond call a divided highway. The entrance—ramp, if you prefer—to the new dual carriageway hadn’t been finished and the blue arrow in the white circle that hung on a post was pointing to the right. I may in fact have thought it was somewhat strange that the Scots—who, like their southern neighbors, drive on the wrong side—would direct traffic to the right side, which is the wrong side in their parochial perversity. But, what the hell, I figured, they must know what they’re doing.

So I drove north in the right but wrong carriageway. I was driving slowly in the left lane, what we’d call the express lane but would normally be the slow lane over there. But in the reverse world I had found myself in—who the hell knows.

Conveniently sparse traffic. And every one of the several cars I encountered—being typical UK drivers, they hugged their slow lane, which would have been our express lane—flashed its single headlight at me. All the cars had two headlights, to be sure, except for one three-wheeler, but, being Scots (and even Englishpersons venturing north), they normally disconnected one headlight to save and replace the other one when it burned out.

I was rather nonplussed that those crazy Scots would be driving in the wrong carriageway and flashing their lights at me. But that was their problem. I was in the right on the right. Until a little baby-blue-and-white Ford Anglia with a darker blue pimple on the roof pulled in front of my smaller but better red Mini (a ten-foot-long true Mini that I couldn’t hope to fit in now), causing me to slam on the brakes. Luckily, I was going slow. Because the panda car, as I later learned those things were called, shouldn’t have pulled into my path and Mini brakes were nothing to write home about.

The doughty Scottish constable alit from his panda car and approached me with a stern expression. On his face. He wasn’t armed, so he didn’t have his hand on his firearm. And luckily—for him—there was no traffic coming to run him down, as he evidently wasn’t aware that he had made himself a perfect target for serious drivers.

I pulled back the window. Real Minis didn’t have roll-down windows, but the ones they did have were real glass. The rozzer, looking down at me, asked (in broken English, of course) whether I knew I was driving on the wrong side of a dual carriageway. He called me “sonny.” He wasn’t wearing a name plate and I didn’t ask his name. And since he wasn’t wearing a skirt, I didn’t ask to see his regimental ID.

I told him that even though I had suspected as much, I had dutifully followed the arrow. “Bloody MOT, still cocked up,” he sort of muttered. MOT, I discovered was the Ministry of Transport, as efficient, it turns out, as the Connecticut Department of Transportation. (What we call departments, most of the world calls ministries.) For some inexplicable reason, the Caledonian rozzer was able to discern that I was an American. And that, he opined, explained a lot. And that’s why he didn’t even ask to see my driving licence [sic].

Since we were only a mile or so from the end of the new dual carriageway, the dour old Scottish constable told me to follow his car, went back to it, switched on the blue pimple, banged a uey (New Englandish for executed a U-turn), and led me to safety.

The English-Scottish border was opened not long after my wrong-way experience. But with Scottish independence in the offing, the barriers are certain to be up again before we know it.

So I survived. Sober, of course, and diligently following the signs. But, as Polonius admonished his son who was going off to college, “This above all, driving the wrong way is never a good idea.”