Tag: driving

I’m home alone right now.  I say “alone”, technically Samuel is in the house too, but he’s blissfully drifting through slumberland right now so I’m not sure that counts.  My wife, on the other hand, is out.  With another man.  Thankfully this isn’t an affair I’ve suddenly unearthed, but it’s arguably worse.  She’s having driving lessons.

Don’t get me wrong, it’s not that I don’t like the idea of Ellie driving – I’m sure she’ll be a fantastic driver, and I have no concerns about that whatsoever.  I’ve already taken her out a few times to try to teach her the basics, and she picked it up fairly quickly.  In the space of three lessons I had got Ellie to get the car moving, change gear (up to third at one point), stop without stalling, steer around parked cars, negotiate junctions, even do a few hill starts.  That, though, was a couple of years ago, and a lot has happened since then to get in the way of her doing any more driving.  Now it’s become more important, so we’ve got her some proper driving lessons with a proper instructor in a proper learner’s car.  And to be perfectly honest, I’m terrified.

I completely understand why Ellie wants to drive, and I don’t blame her for it at all.  It’s going to be incredibly useful for all of us if she can drive.  She can drive me to work and have the car during the day to go into town, do the shopping, take Samuel to various places, and pick me up in the evening.  We can share the driving on long journeys.  She can go out for a jaunt if she’s in the mood for it, without needing me to come too.  She’ll have the freedom to go where she wants, when she wants, without inconveniencing me or anyone else.  It’ll save us money on bus fares.  Ellie will be able to ferry me around if I break my leg or something.  Eventually we could even get a second car and we could both drive around at the same time.  It’ll be fantastic.

But, all that said, I’m still somewhat nervous about the whole thing.   (more…)

I was out driving the other day, and someone overtook me in a lovely Porsche 911 Carrera S.  I looked across as it glided past, and at the driver at the wheel, and thought “what have you done to deserve that car?”  Not in a judgemental way, mind you, but it got me thinking.

In many car racing computer games your entitlement to drive particular classes of car has to be earned through proving your driving skill, rather than just the accumulation of money.  It strikes me that actually this is a fair and sensible approach, and one that highlights just how inadequate and antiquated our current system is.  At the moment we only have one driving test, which is a simple yes/no answer to the question “did this person meet the minimum requirements on the day of the test”.  The same driving test entitles someone to drive a rusty old Vauxhall Corsa, or a Bugatti Veyron.  There’s something wrong there, methinks.

And so, as I drove along in my Ford Escort, I worked out the finer details of my idea to revolutionise driving tests, licences and car manufacture.  To my surprise and delight, it looks like it might actually be a good idea!

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I like to think of myself as a Driver.  Not just someone who happens to drive, mind you, an actual Driver.  With a capital D.  I see a car not as an object or a tool to be controlled, but as an extension of my own body.  The wheels are my limbs, gripping to the road and telling me all about the road surface.  The engine is a muscle, delivering power when and how I determine, and which needs rest and exercise to operate properly.  And the driver’s seat, the steering wheel, the pedals, the gear stick, are all part of my central nervous system, delivering the impulses from my brain to the respective parts of the extended body.  Driving, for me, is not about getting from A to B – it’s about living life in an augmented reality.

And the A303 is a fantastic road to experience that reality.  I’ve been driving on it a lot recently, and each journey has built upon the last my love and appreciation for what, for many, is just a road.  You see, the A303 isn’t like a motorway.  It’s slower, certainly, but it’s more scenic, more interesting to drive, and requires more skill to navigate effectively.  Now, I’m not saying that you have to be a qualified driver to make it all the way down the road, it’s not exactly precarious, but being a Driver means I can appreciate and embrace all the twists and turns, the adverse cambers, the ever-changing gradients, the varying speed limits, the wavering lane widths, the unpredictable surface quality.  For someone trying to get from A to B, the A303 is an inefficient pain in the neck that urgently needs resurfacing and making dual-carriageway the entire length of it.  And that’s why I love it so.

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C is for Cars and Carriages

Now, it may appear from this post that I have nothing better to do with my time at the moment than waste countless hours sat in front of a screen twiddling knobs and tapping incessantly on keys without really achieving anything productive.  And they may be a modicum of truth in that hypothesis.  However, I can assure you that the time I have spent playing has been (for the most part) well-chosen and has not adversely interfered with the normal running of my life.  It has of course been lots of fun.

First of all, I recently acquired something I have wanted for years – a steering wheel.  No, not for my car, but for the computer.  And since all my games are now on the PS2, it had to be one that I could plug into that.  An hour or so on eBay and a handful of reviews culminated in a purchase of a Logitech Driving Force EX steering wheel, which was plugged in and tested as soon as I was able (i.e. the evening of the day it arrived – see, I didn’t skip work for this), driving my current favourite game: Gran Turismo 4.

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B is for B-roads and Bye Byes

(Sorry this post is a little belated, I’ve had a lot on and haven’t got round to writing this up).

Ahead of our cross-country migration at the end of this month, I’ve been having to schedule in some goodbyes.  Significant amongst my friendship groups is the Colchester Mini Club, both the cars and their drivers.  I’ve been a member of the club for as long as I’ve owned a Mini, which is several years, and last Wednesday was my last opportunity to go to a club meeting.  It was a night of fun and excitement, even if it was tinged with sadness.

Something else that made that night a little more difficult was that my Mini was going to be there.  I’ve been going to the meetings each month in the Escort for a while now, while Neddy was off the road for the winter, but there was a very different feel on Wednesday evening driving there knowing that I was no longer a Mini owner, especially given that the car was going to be there anyway, belonging to someone else.  Selling a Mini really is like selling a close friend, and there’s a lot of emotion surrounding it.

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Eight years.  That’s how long I’ve been living in the wrong end of England.  I say “wrong”, but perhaps that’s a slight exaggeration.  I came here to study for a degree, and when it was over I just never got round to leaving and going somewhere nicer.  I’ve never been much of a city boy, and before any of you starts yelling about Colchester not being a city, it’s all comparative – when you’ve come from the countryside, a dual-carriageway is a big scary road, and if you can’t get from one end of the town to the other in ten minutes then something is very wrong.

So it comes as an enormous sigh of relief that Ellie and I have found a lovely new house to move into in a few weeks time!  This week we travelled down to Bristol to stay with my grandparents for a couple of days while we scoured the locality for potential places to set up residence.  We’d spent a fair amount of time reading through the results on RightMove.co.uk, and found a few we thought looked promising, and when we arrived in Bristol on Tuesday evening we had three houses we particularly wanted to look at: one in Peasedown St John, one in Evercrecch, and one in Bedminster.  Grandma quickly told us that Bedminster wasn’t a great area, so we weren’t too disappointed when the estate agents never got back to us about getting us a viewing.

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I know it’s Easter Sunday, and I really am excited and thrilled to know that Jesus rose from the dead, but there’s more – Neddy lives too!  It’s clearly the day for resurrections.  After several months of being garaged, my lovely Mini is now back on the road, healthy and alive and really loving it!

I was actually hoping to sell Neddy way back in November, when we bought our Ford Escort Ghia X, which was intended to replace our little Mini.  Unfortunately I couldn’t find a buyer at the time, what with the credit crunch driving car prices down, so Neddy sat almost completely forgotten in the garage, not seeing the light of day or feeling the tarmac under his tyres.  I did make sure the car was MOTed before Christmas, but due to lack of buyers I opted to SORN the car rather than renewing the tax disc, with the intention of getting the ball rolling again in the spring, by which time hopefully the car market would have improved.

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Actually, that’s a little harsh, it wasn’t quite that bad.  And second time around was much less stressful.  Not to mention gentler on the upholstery.

Oh, sorry, you’ll be wanting some context.  Ahem.  Allow me to back up and start again.

I now have a second person on my insurance policy, and much to my wife’s disappointment it’s not her.  My friend Sarah has another driving test coming up next week and wanted to get as much practice as possible before zero-hour, so I put her on my insurance for a week as an additional named driver.  Of course, that’s meant that I’ve had to actually take her out in the car, which was pretty scary, for both of us.

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