THEY gave us rock and roll, rubbish telly, fast food, and shopping malls. And now, it seems, in response to decades of largesse from the US, we’re given the Americans something back. Roundabouts.

Soon there will be roundabouts in every state of the union, according to Eugene R Russell, who chairs America’s Transportation Research Board roundabouts task force. Now there’s a job description that will knock ’em dead at dinner parties.

For it seems that the home of the brave and the land of the free has started to embrace the “circular traffic intersection” designed in Britain in the Sixties and exported worldwide. Except, until now that is, to America.

In a place awash with traffic “blinkers” (that’s lights to you and me) and four-way stops where motorists give way to each other in turn at crossroads – which, incidentally, would never work over here because we drive too finger-flickingly fast compared to our American cousins, who are more used to wallowing around in cars with spongy suspension and driving seats like fireside chairs – roundabouts are starting to appear like giant Tarmac doughnuts.

And nowhere more so than in Carmel in California, now dubbed the Milton Keynes of the US, where the mayor has been at the forefront of a drive that has seen the demolition of 78 sets of traffic lights in favour of the circular roadways so familiar over here but so little known over there.

It shows, too. For while some 3,000 roundabouts might have been built in the States in the last 20 years, there are millions of Yanks who haven’t a bloody clue how to use them. As I know only too well.

We’re currently on the flexed-arm shaped spit of land off Massachusetts called Cape Cod where we return to each summer, and this small 70-odd mile long sandbar is peculiar in that it has three roundabouts – or rotaries as they call them here – all within a few miles of each other. Which for the US, unless you’re in Carmel, 3,000 miles away on the other side of the country, is a very rare indeed.

But having three rotaries within close proximity appears to do nothing to improve American drivers’ ability to use them. The other day I saw a cyclist go the wrong way round the rotary at the head of the local main street, completely oblivious to the cars and trucks moving in the opposite direction. Mind you, in a state where cyclists can ride on any side of the road they like rather than with the flow of traffic, that’s perhaps not surprising.

And it’s not unknown for drivers to wait until a rotary is completely devoid of all vehicles before venturing forward to negotiate it. Cue mega-tailbacks but, strangely, no hooting of horns with impatience. It’s like they’re perched on the edge of an abyss waiting to fling themselves off it.

They have no notion of giving way to traffic from the right, which is hardly surprising given that they drive on the opposite side of the road to us so have to give way from the left.

But even so, the concept of moving into the circular flow of traffic as gaps permit is complete anathema to them and it ends up as an orbital free-for-all with drivers carving each other up big style as though they can’t wait to get off the darned thing in a “stop the world I want to get off” kind of way. At last!

Something the over-enthusiastic, super self-confident Americans can’t profess to be good at…

• REBEKAH Brooks – she of the murky, deeply-stinking News International world – should stop protecting her backside by bleating that she was on holiday when the alleged hacking of Milly Dowler’s phone took place, so it was “inconceivable” that she knew about it, even though she was editor of the now-defunct News of the World at the time. She should go.

David Cameron should stop protecting his “come round for nibbles” Titian-haired chum and take a firmer stand against the Murdoch empire, rather than bleating that the police inquiry needs to take its course.

And in the way that broadcasters can only be granted an operational licence if they are deemed “fit and proper”, given the seemingly never-ending shocking phone-hacking revelations that keep crawling out of the woodwork, there is now a case for a similar regulatory approach for print-based media.

The likes of the News of the World have wrecked it for the rest of the newspaper world in terms of self-monitoring. Freedom of the press? I don’t think so. Not after this.