Speed Awareness Course
another asburd chapter in the Kingsley Amis novel that is my life
A few months ago I broke the speed limit. Not in a bad way - I didn’t drive fast through a village or whatever; I was doing 84mph on a motorway (so 14mph over the limit and 7mph over its buffer) in my hurry to get back from Leicestershrie to Oxford so as to make the morning eucharist mass on time.
Anyway, my speeding was apparently mild enough for me to merit the training and its £100 fee over the three points on my license and the £100 fine.
And so, early on a grey Wednesday morning in February, I managed after multiple failed attempts to make it onto a Teams meeting with seven other speeders, a true cross-section of whoever hadn’t anything better to do at 8.30am that Wednesday.
Once things kicked off, it felt like being back at school. The instructor held each of our guilty hands through the course, though with my other hand I truly Hermione Grangered the crap out of that class. I wrote (with a pen!) all sorts of facts about the cost of car accidents to the NHS and the tax payer and knew the answers to all the questions. I was, in hindsight, a bit of a swot, but I wasn’t as bad as Jane.
I liked our guide, a very reasonable professional who didn’t take any longer than she needed to explain anything, but my fellow felon Jane seemed to crave censure and to treat the session as though it were some kind of meeting for speeders anonymous.
On one occasion, our guide went through the difference in stopping distance between a car going 30mph, and another of the exact make/build/type going 31mph. If these cars, she told us, were to brake at precisely the same time, then by the time 30mph had stopped, 31mph would still be moving at 8mph!
‘How does that make you feel?’, our guide asked the group.
Tony, a guy I decided I liked for his let’s-get-this-over-with attitude, said, ‘that’s pretty shocking I’d say, yeah.’
This was the right answer, but Jane had her hand up.
Our guide noticed:
‘Jane? You’d like to offer something?’
‘Thanks. Yeah, well, if I may I’d like to put my hand up’, said Jane, somewhat redundantly, ‘and say that what I really feel, that what I really feel, actually, is guilt.’
‘Thanks, Jane. Yes, it’s quite alarmi-’
But Jane wasn’t done.
‘And I feel… regret. I feel’, said Jane, reaching for a suitable word to complete her closing remarks…
‘Remorse?’, I offered.
‘I feel remorse,’ said Jane with finality, nodding with herself, with me, and so the class, impassive in the face of Jane’s solemnity, moved on.
‘So what should we do when we feel tired on the road?’ asked our guide about half-an-hour later.
‘Stop, if you can’, said Judith, another person I liked.
‘Indeed, Judith, if you can. But we know that’s not always possible.’
‘Crack open a window?’, suggested Tony.
‘Yes, Tony, definitely a good idea to let in some fresh air. Anyone else? Matt?’, she said, seeing my hand up.
‘Well, I don’t know if anyone saw that film Mr. Bean’s Holiday, but what the guy does in that, well, he’s driving through France to get to Cannes film festival but in order to get there on time he needs to drive through the night, so what he does is he takes two toothpicks and uses each one to keep his eyes open, like this’, and then I demonstrated, forcing open my eyelids with my fingers, ‘and, well, it worked for him.’
Everyone, including our guide, started laughing. Everyone except for Jane, who, exasperated with the idiots surrounding her, yelled:
‘Yes, but he’s an exceptional person!!!’
And I looked back at her, with my eyelids still pulled out to their poles, and nodded slowly while we stared at each other in total misunderstanding.
