When I lived in Germany, back in the Cold War, my favourite menace to navigation was a middle-aged woman on a moped, heading home from work with her basket brimming with briefcase, office shoes and supper ingredients, steering with one hand and using the other to secure the load. Typically, this person would find her place in the heavy Hauptstrasse traffic right spung in my blind spot, from which she would erupt without warning (Signal? Never!) to rocket through the tiniest imaginable gap between Landkreuzwagons and disappear in the general direction of suburbia.

I wondered where they trained -- the Wall of Death?