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Once I was one of the merry uninitiated, strolling contentedly along the pavement, smiling wryly as the fumes and sweat of rush hour stagnated around me. Ah, that will never be me I mused. Being of an eco bent I contented myself that by not having driving lessons I was a noble rebel, bucking the vulgar, destructive trend of trundling around in tin egos leaching 10,000 different types of toxin into the air. Besides, my father drives, so I certainly didn’t need to. Until, of course, said father, after 30 years of chauffeuring, presented a startling ultimatum. Much like an upper-class loafer threatened with the removal of his allowance, ‘learn to drive or no more lifts’ had seismic effects. And after a successful ten years of skilfully avoiding these effects, and much taking advantage of paternal goodwill, the final blow was struck by the dire exigencies of employment: ‘You do really need to drive for this job…’ *** And so it begins. The clammy hands, the pounding chest, the quiver in the voice. All these nervous reactions take hold as you attempt to telephone a driving instructor to arrange a lesson. The well-connected amongst us are spared the roulette wheel of tremulously leafing through the yellow pages. Those without a jovial and much loved Uncle who conveniently teaches driving are left appealing to whichever deity takes their fancy to look down with mercy upon a soul in need. Please, oh lordy, deliver me from the mad, the depressed, the angry. After much of this voodoo and incantation you finally make the call. And discover your newly appointed instructor is either mad, depressed or angry. Driving instructors are a strange breed, generally drawn from a pool of the recently retired or the recently redundant. They sport a face etched with financial worry; the face of man who has recently been caught stealing the work’s Christmas Fund money in a vain attempt to pay off gambling debts and keep his kneecaps. And men they invariably are. It is a fortunate soul who stumbles across a Paula’s School of Motoring and develops in the nurturing womb of a Vauxhall Corsa. My own area scores 100% on the testosterone scale. And I would hazard that this 100% are the type of men who have endured a dark night of the soul, which generally follows a quite dusky evening of the soul when the wife has left and taken the kids with her. With the whisky downed, a hose pipe firmly secured to the exhaust and the garage doors tightly sealed with towels, a trembling hand reaches for the ignition key. It is then a sudden realisation dawns. “Wait! I can drive. If I can drive I can teach other idiots to drive! I won’t lose the house. Stand down the bailiffs! I’m saved! Sadly, with each gear crunching,
clutch-burning new student this epiphany soon passes, and a more settled, quieter,
form of despair takes root. Thus is the
fully formed driving instructor ready to arrive at your address, laden with his
emotional baggage. Baggage which is
swiftly unpacked on your doorstep.
Before long the naïve learner will be regaled with anecdotes about past
and present sexual conquests as the paunchy middle-aged Lothario attempts, via
his young charge, to conjure his youth back into existence. Once this palls, the learner is subjected to
wry and bitter commentary on divorce proceedings and failings as a father. Should the embryonic driver dip into the pool
of sexagenarians with cars they will be spared the unpleasant imagery of the
rutting middle-aged. However, the
alternative is enduring rambling old men endlessly repeating the same stories
about creosoting fences. In addition, it
is not long before graphic depictions of ailments, medical worries and accounts
of heart attacks are unleashed. In
general, these types are the best that can be hoped for. There is always the small risk of a fabled
‘sideshow bob’ showing up. This is rare,
however, and should a hairy lunatic be responsible for your safety the only
thing to do is pray. And despite assurances to the contrary a Driving Instructor’s sole concern is avoiding damage to his car. Adverts proclaiming ‘nervous drivers welcome’ are a smokescreen. The confidence and safety of their charge is firmly strapped into the back seat with travel monopoly to distract it, whilst the risk of a dint in the bumper or a cracked rear tail light is riding up front whispering in his ear ‘I’ll be very expensive to fix you know…’ Once uncomfortably seated, you are ready to ascend to the next level of torment. Whilst an overriding fear of death is noble and indeed sensible, as first you throttle your vehicle into life you discover another, less savoury cause of anxiety. The process of learning to drive is a rare example of voluntary public humiliation. All those nightmares of sitting on a toilet, trousers down, in the middle of a shopping centre become something of a reality as you lumber round that first corner, juddering and jerking like a beast in its final death throws. The L-plate plastered car, especially if ornamented with a big triangular roof sign, is the vehicular equivalent of wandering around your home town wearing a gigantic dunce’s hat. Possibly with idiot stencilled on your forehead. Your inadequacy and bumbling learner status are there on display for the world to see, point at and laugh at. You find you are loathed by your fellow road companions. For one, you are in their way, wobbling across various lanes at a speed more suitable for crossing a fragile rope bridge on stilts. They therefore hate you and race past furiously at any opportunity, expressing their disdain via the medium of speed. But their hate has deeper roots as all the memories of their own tortuous rite of tarmaced passage come flooding back, and thus, like any bully, they must punish you for failings and fears in themselves. This clawing sense of social anxiety is possibly why the less sensitive members of society seem to be so well represented on the roads. Someone who regularly appears in public adorned with Burberry cap, copious amounts of dangling faux gold jewellery and sportswear that could easily be mistaken for an oversized romper suit has no fear of the humiliating brand of the big L. Those of us with taste, brains and self-awareness sadly have a little more trouble dealing with public humiliation. After about five minutes the next flaw in the system of driver instruction becomes clear. Driving instructors are incapable of instruction. Terrified, anxious people need the nuanced skills of an empathetic teacher, a councillor and possibly a psychologist. Unfortunately, the emotionally stunted creatures with their feet on the duel controls and one hand eager to grab the wheel at any opportunity come from the ‘drown in the deep end’ school of learning. It is whilst in the tumult of these terrors and perturbations that the novice driver first discovers the usefulness of rage. As the continual nagging, constant humiliation and ever present terror of death reaches the limits of tolerance, the rage takes over. My own experience involved a tone of incessant chastisement imploring me to ‘get your speed up’ snapping the part of my brain that resents mightily being spoken to as if I were a seven year old child. ‘You want me to speed up? Right, I’ll give you speed up!’ was the irrational reaction as I floored the accelerator. Whilst this burst of rage merely took me from a feeble 25 up to a more acceptable 40, it nevertheless provided a valuable lesson – that lesson being when annoyed with a challenging situation say ‘bollocks to it’ and act recklessly. This first anxiety banishing wave of rage opens the floodgates. A lesson or two in you swiftly realize that driving and its rules and restrictions are absurd and you know best. Under instruction you have diligently poured over the highway code, observed safety precautions, committed your trust to the makers of those rules in good faith. Then you attempt to navigate a town centre. Keeping your eyes on the road. But also looking at the mirrors. All three of them. So, don’t look at the road. Two hands on the wheel, except when changing gear, so to hell with that. And don’t change lanes at the last minute. Apart from here, where two roundabouts implausibly meet and you have to swerve from right to left and stop before the zebra crossing thereby blocking all the traffic behind you. And when it’s dark and raining, well, just try not to die. At whatever age, learning to drive renders us all the angry disaffected teen, riling at the dishonesty of the system, gear stick in one hand, dog eared copy of The Catcher in the Rye in the other. Initially you are the resentful toddler forced to eat your greens, wailing and pouting when confronted with the reality of your powerlessness. Then the hypocrisies present themselves in abundance and like, it’s just so unfair. You realize driving is lucrative. How it is essential to keep the economy well greased so the façade of safety must be maintained. The powers that be say “if you obey our rules you’ll be fine” whilst thinking “ha – you fools, driving isn’t safe and you may die. Another glass of single malt Jeeves!” And thus is your journey from scowling toddler to dreadlocked mayday protester complete. Finally, there is one remaining absurdity to endure. For years small children learn how cars work via grand theft auto and need for speed 3. Sensibly, one trigger for go, one for stop. Also one button for get out and beat a prostitute to death, but let’s gloss over that. Now, once inside a real car, eager to drive down a monorail track on two wheels, the young mind is instantly confused as your instructor diligently points out the pedals for stop, go and a kind of thing that makes it difficult to stop and go. The clutch. The clutch is a ridiculous concept. Instantly you feel cheated. Depressing the clutch does not result in unlocking all weapons or saving your current mission. The clutch is there to annoy and confuse, but most importantly it is there to make you stall. It is, therefore, an implement of cosmic ridicule sent to destroy you. Even the lofty tome Driving: the essential skills from the DSA admits The other important part is allowing the clutch plates
to engage fully So, given the chance, the clutch will kill you. Once the trauma of discovering the clutch settles, the banality of gear changing begins its wearying progress. To take your mind off the terror of approaching a busy junction you can wrestle with the gear stick attempting to find second, thereby not concentrating at all on what you are about to drive into. But what’s this? Occasionally a learner can stumble across an image like the one shown below: Further research uncovers the conspiracy. After hours of expensive, gear crunching, stalling humiliation you discover there are contraptions termed ‘automatics’. No clutch. No gear changes. Go, stop. Driven by many, many Americans. There is only one conclusion to be drawn. Driving lessons are, after school, the last time society’s oligarchs have free reign to humiliate, shame and terrify their population. It employs damaged, depressed individuals to teach you, as poorly as possible, how to control a bizarrely uncontrollable contraption. They want to break you. So when fuel prices soar again we clutch controlled conditioned subservients won’t blockade ports and petrol stations and the authorities will only have to deal with lorry drivers, those wild beings who respond to the stimulus of a bacon buttie and little else. So how can one escape the humiliation, the oppressive conditioning, the impotent rage? There would appear to be three options. Don’t drive; content yourself with using close friends and relatives, testing the limits of their love and affection. You may end up alone, friendless, housebound or utterly dependant on buses, but hell, you’ve avoided the worst experience of your life. If you feel you lack the moral fibre to just say no, the second best option is simply to be dangerously incompetent. This is a relatively simple campaign which involves driving straight into a tree. Sympathy from friends and relatives may be in short supply as they foolishly encourage you to get straight back in the saddle. To remedy this, a simple adaptation to the incompetence method is available in running someone over. You can feign trauma and never have need of driving again! This strategy does, however, involve killing someone so a strong will is required. Alternatively, you may want to challenge the absurdity of the driving education system, lobbying for a new law which requires all learners to spend half their lives in a simulator. Once the simulator is passed novices can move on to custom built tracks. They will then, after a year or two, be able to control a dangerous vehicle expertly once they first trundle out on the road. Similarly, you could wear a hemp shirt and campaign to ban the car. Both campaigns will unfortunately render you a crank, and British society will ridicule and hate you. Therefore, you may as well just learn to drive. But hell, learn to drive like an angry man.
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