Some advice

These days, nobody takes advice. And partly that's because advice isn't given at the right time. In a taxi today, the driver tried to overtake another car on the left, situating himself perfectly in the other driver's blindspot. Nowhere is the element of surprise so important as when you're driving.

The other car lurched left to block us, and probably would have collided if my driver hadn't leaned on his horn for a prolonged blast, then swerved himself. Only then did a soothing female voice issue from the dashboard, telling him "drive carefully".

It may have been miscalibrated, or perhaps he was just an awful driver, because for the remaining ten minutes of our journey, I heard those dulcet tones, admonishing him to "drive carefully" again and again.

Perhaps they should have programmed it to whisper "stop honking your horn" as he only had two ways to control his vehicle: the accelerator pedal, and beeping at people. I didn't realise that Singaporean taxi drivers had been trained in Rome, but now I come to think of it, after a year of being driven around by a succession of motorheads intent on getting somewhere as fast as possible, maybe it makes sense that they're actually hopped up on espressos and trying to live la dolce vita at warp speed.