During my BA days at SOAS (School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London), I noticed one day a boy in my classical Chinese class wearing one pale green sock and one pale blue sock. It turned out he was colour-blind. On subsequent occasions, I discovered he couldn’t differentiate between dark green and dark red (maroon) when I pointed out the beds of tulips in a park and he couldn’t find them. Ditto when I remarked on a lawn dotted profusely with tiny daisies.
This reminded me of my eldest sister’s friend back in the 60s in Singapore. For some reason, he managed to pass his driving test — maybe it wasn’t a widely-known condition then? If the traffic lights were aligned vertically, he’d know the top light was red and the bottom green. If they were horizontal, however, he’d wait until the cars around him started driving off before he would. If the roads were deserted and his was the only car, the poor chap would sit there for a while, not knowing if he should drive off, or he’d wait until another car appeared on the scene to give him an indication. (Singaporeans are so law-abiding that they wouldn’t dare violate the law even if there were no other cars around for him to pose any danger to them.)
(Singapore, mid-1960s; London, late 1970s)
Not exactly what the average Italian driver would do if he couldn't tell the color of a traffic light...
ReplyDeleteWhat strikes me, though, is how he could tell the color in the vertical arrangement but not the horizontal one. Couldn't he learn if the red light was at the right or the left? The only explanation would be if the red light was consistently at the top in the vertical arrangement, but it could be at either side in the horizontal one...
Because the vertical ones are always (from top to bottom) red, amber, green; whereas the horizontal ones were not always in the same direction, so they were sometimes left to right, sometimes right to left, leaving him unable to tell which end was red, which end was green.
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