No doubt many of you will have read of the recent travails of the Lagos traffic police. This august organisation, driven demented, if you'll excuse the pun, by the antics of Nigerian motorists, were forced to subject a whopping 608 of the 22,418 people busted last year to psychiatric testing after they were caught driving the wrong way down city streets.
Surprisingly, only one of these unfortunates was found to be actually legally insane, while a further 20 were simply so stupid they were deemed unsuitable for driving.
Frankly, in a country where driving hell for leather against the flow of traffic is almost the norm and road deaths - at 7,000 a year - are among the highest anywhere in the world, the sanity of anyone who would get behind the wheel of a car and venture into the motorised maelstrom is to be questioned.
In mitigation, the majority of drivers in Nigeria have never sat or passed a driving test. As for road markings and signposts, they're as common on Nigerian roads as rollerblading swordfish. So the motorists are not entirely to blame. Presumably the classic defence of ignorance is oft bandied about the courtrooms of Lagos.
Now, while we may chortle condescendingly at these antics, we have no right to be smug on this island.
Have you ever driven in Northern Ireland? I'm not the most experienced or well-travelled driver around, but I know one thing - never, ever, have I seen more complete maniacs in one small space doing more insane things.
Now, I'm aware that I risk heaping the opprobrium of a million people on my head by saying this, but that never put me off before - the sooner the PSNI follows the lead of their African colleagues and begins insanity tests, the better.
Perhaps it's some form of collective psychosis that surfaces once Northern motorists get behind the wheel and manifests as their devil-take-the-hindmost driving style. They appear to have some pathological aversion to having someone driving ahead of them, some deep-rooted psychological compulsion to overtake at all costs. Whatever it is, it's terrifying.
Last week, I drove my intended and her parents back from Scotland on the Stranraer ferry. As if having my prospective parents-in-law in the back of my car wasn't nerve-wracking enough, I had Belfast to contend with. It began badly - the boat was full of bikers on their way to the Northwest 200 road race.
Not that I've anything against them per se - it's just difficult to negotiate a car park filled with 100 adults acting like children on a school trip to the BMX park.
After an hour stuck in a traffic jam - including an eerie 15 minutes in an estate being eyed-up by a gang of malevolent-looking feral teenagers who appeared to be undecided whether to tear us out of the car before torching it or not bother and just leave us inside - we got onto the open road. Then the fun really began.
Whoosh. Whoosh. Whoosh. It was as if we, travelling at just under 60, were standing still. They took us on corners, they took us on straights, they took us on roundabouts, they took us on the hard-shoulder.
We were even overtaken by an ice-cream van, Neil Bloody Diamond blaring out of its speakers at it shot past at 90, Flakes flying everywhere and the Choc-Ice munching driver oblivious to the trauma he was instilling in me.
One lunatic drove her hatchback, gears screeching and tyres smoking, the wrong side of a concrete traffic island and into oncoming cars just to get past us. In a 30 mph zone. She had a pink teddy bear giving us the finger on the rear window ledge.
Which I thought pretty much summed up the whole experience of driving in the North nicely.
