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Excellent comments, minteroonie and very accurate. I tend to use less polite words however than your author!

Wools, here are a few sentences I have copied from a book I am reading and I was keen to reproduce them here because, while I think the same things, I do not have the writer's facility for expressing them. The following remarks are made by one of the characters and I have paraphrased only slightly so as to guard the sense. We live in such a humourless age. It used to be possible to laugh....... Well, now there are all sorts of censors and killjoys. Earnest, ignorant people who lecture us on what we can think and say. And do you know, we have lain down and submitted to the whole process. It's been the most remarkable display of passivity. There is a bit more along similar lines but I think we get a good flavour of what the speaker in the story means to say.

It is very common round here. I do it. If you have been hit by a driver from the rear whilst sitting at a light, you tend to take all precautions possible to try to avoid it happening again.