There was once a young man whose house was on one side of central London and whose job was on the other.

There was once a young man whose house was on one side of central London
and whose job was on the other. It was a highly lucrative job, and
after a couple of years he bought himself one of the most expensive new
cars you can imagine. It was really brightly coloured; the horn made a
stentorian Beep-Beep, it went extremely fast, it made a lot of noise,
and all the girls looked at you when you got out of it.

But living in London has its drawbacks, and one of these was that he
scarcely ever had the chance to drive the car at its top speed, and he
found this ever so frustrating. He complained to a friend, who
suggested that he take the car to Ireland. `Ireland had a huge road
building program in the 19th century', the friend explained, `but there
isn't the traffic there, and there's no speed limit'. [All these
purported facts are entirely fictitious but this is a JOKE, not a
tourist guide.] And immediately the young motorist booked his car on the
ferry to Ireland.

The journey took a day; he woke up early in Dublin and jumped into the
driving seat. The car glided onto the main road
south-west, and soon the houses disappeared and the countryside began,
and the road lay straight and empty and wide and level and inviting
before him.

Down went the foot on the accelerator and the needle on the speedometer
jerked clockwise: 120 mph, 130, 140... and then, as suddenly if they
had appeared from nowhere, he saw a man and a donkey crossing the road
in front of him: so unused to traffic that they hadn't bothered to look
out for it. He swerved the car to the right, missing them both, but he
could not stop in time and he crashed the car through a fence and hit an
old tree in the nearby field.

And the old man said to the donkey: `Sure, an' we just got out of dat
field in time, didn't we!'