...On Learning to Drive

After being asked for a year and half (because apparently if you don't start your driving lessons on your 17th birthday your not human) when I'm going to start learning to drive, so I can get a car that I can't afford and then crash it, I've finally booked them. As much as I want to drive, at the moment there really is no real need, especially when you clock the cost of the insurance which for me is somehow six times the worth of the few hundred pound car that I'd be driving. What their saying is that I'm going to completely write it off six times in my first year. Now I know that 25% (or something like that) of all crashes are young men between ages of 17 and 24 but the insurance has gone up almost two fold for me since I did a preliminary check last year. Now, is it just me or does that not seem a tad excessive?

Now because I've done a few hours of driving over the past year or two I decided to book a block of 20 hours, knowing that I could add some at a later date. The following Friday night, whilst I was having some private time with my now ex-girlfriend, my phone rings three times in half an hour between 8 and 9PM. On the Tuesday of the next week, whilst patching in network cable at work, the same number rings again and I answer it to find out its my Instructor Company. The guy on the end of the phone said this: "I tried to get hold of you last week but you weren't answering." Because apparently I couldn't possibly be doing anything at all on a Friday night. I don't know if these people live on a different planet where they don't have social lives but they shouldn't be ringing up people at that time right? Is that not included in one of the many training courses?

Moving onto my first lesson on a public road. It went quite well actually, only one or two stalls and a mistaken gear change in 90 minutes of driving. Even if I was feeling dizzy because we must have gone around at least as many roundabouts. However at the end of it my instructor said he was pleased with how things had gone so that put my worries to bed for a while. Today I had my second lesson, 2 hours of driving this time, and again it went quite well except for a double kangaroo stall at a set of lights on a hill. On that point, stalling like that only ever seems to happen at the lights when there at least 500 cars queued up behind you. I did notice how a learner coming in the opposite direction to me barely left me enough room between him and the stone wall. Bloody learner drivers!

During a 10 minutes brake to go over a few things, and more importantly to rest my limbs a bit, my instructor went over the different sorts of crossings; Zebra, Pelican and Toucan. Now I was familiar with the first two, the zebra has no traffic lights as such and you must let people across, yet somehow I seem to find that not many people obey that particular law. Pelicans are the ones where you push the button and the traffic lights, eventually, turn red and you can cross. So what on Earths a Toucan crossing? For those of you as stumped as I was, a Toucan crossing is like a Pelican crossing except it also has a green light for cyclists. Did that really require a whole new name?

As my Theory Test is in just over a weeks time, wish me luck, I've been revising for that two using the company iPhone app. There are lots of very on questions in there but one of them was; What does a blue circular sign with the number 30 written in white on it mean? Turns out that's a minimum speed limit sign. I beg the question has anyone ever seen one of these in operation? They've managed to evade myself and my family members all our lives. However, what this means is that there can now be a minimum speed limits on all roads. How brilliant would that be if on a motorway, except for heavy goods vehicles, if it was the law for you to be doing the national speed limit. Then all those average speed cameras the government set up can check this and send you a fine if your going to slowly. An even better idea, one that would drastically reduce unemployment, would be to train people up at traffic snipers that sit on top of bridges and pick people off who are holding up the traffic and breaking the law. 

So there we go, quite by chance, I've sorted out unemployment and enabled everyone to get where their going on time. Of the plan would involve many more guns out and about so crime could rise but that method has already tried and tested in the UK's secret test and training facility knowing as the United States of America and there's certainly no lack of Americans in the world.