R U QRS

How many accidents are caused by drivers deciphering number plates? One minute you're driving along with a chronologically placed plate in front of you and one behind you. Generated by a bureaucratic database, they're numbers you can trust.

Then...

Out of the blue, a quirky creative strip of metal flashes by. The number plate in a perpetual state of perplexment. In the ensuing moments your mind leaves the road as you try to work out what it means. In most instances your autopilot maintains the car on its flight path. I can only guess that some must leave the road in askance at a stranger's turpitude.

I narrowly avoided a lamppost recently as I was trying to figure out why someone was querying my sexuality. R U QRS was translated by me as 'are you queers'. I realised after a few cranial gymnastics that it meant 'are you curious?' No I'm not curious but I would've been furious if my head had nogged the lamppost. By good fortune I wasn't behind a wheel at the time.

There's no hidden agenda in BCY186 - I know, because that's my number plate. It was on the car when I bought it. A simple number plate for a down to earth car. I love my Toyota Corolla but will never use it to advertise my sexuality or availability. Who wants to know and even if they did, by the time they'd worked out that I was a rampant hussey (I'd like to point out that I'm not, sadly) they'd be several kilometres out of luck.

And I'd still be behind the wheel listening to my radio station of choice, singing with all the gusto of an operatic diva without the gift of tune.

But interestingly, I've started to notice the radio ads. Unfortunately to get a radio station that has songs with a tune, you have to wrestle with your own mortality. And as you tootle along the road missing cats and pedestrians you're brought face to face with it.

I am intrigued how the ads manage to put the fun back into funeral. I'm nearly excited about buying into a retirement village although am a little concerned that there are more women than men. I rationalised being several decades younger might give me a head start in the dating stakes but worried that live-in children might not be a welcome asset.

The erectile-dysfunction-fixer ads offer a glimmer of hope to the limp, although sometimes they're so oblique that I may have drawn the wrong conclusion as to the product. It might be elephant's toothpaste or a hair removal product for all I know. But the voices are always reasuring if not a little obtuse.

And then there's my hearing... eyesight... joint problems (not the naughty ones)... and the list goes on. All things that I hadn't been worried about in my thirties.

As I squint a bit at the screen, feeling the crows feet claw in, I think it's time for my beauty sleep.