Why don't you learn to speak English? No, the other English.

We have a large traffic circle in Rye, the almost tautological Daniel Balls Circle. And of course,unlike the English, who spend their lives driving curvaceously, nobody in America knows the rules for precedence. So screeching to a halt with a smug blare of the horn is almost a daily pastime in the leafy suburbs.

It happened the other day, and this time I caught up with the offender, a lady of my years, at the next traffic signal. Pulling up beside her I signaled that she should wind down the window.

"You know you went through two yield signs," I accuse.

"But I didn't see a thing," she replies. (Last time I accosted a different female driver in the same situation, she excused herself by saying that although the word "YIELD" was painted in large letters on the road, she thought she could ignore it because "she had the straight through.")

Oy. "You have to yield to traffic already on the circle," I inform her in exasperated tones, and wind up my window, rather majestically.

Or rather, that's what I should have said. But when I get short-tempered, I lapse back into my native tongue.

So I wonder what she made of the grumpy old git with the English accent who spluttered mysteriously that she needed to "give way to traffic on the roundabout"?

Wheels within wheels: Swindon's notorious Magic Roundabout.