Don’t even ask me how fast I had to go to get to the speed awareness course on time. The rush-hour dash was made even worse by the fact that the letter from ‘the UK’s leading provider of occupational road risk management, driver assessment and training for corporate organisations and speed awareness’ warned me that if I was not there at 4.45 p.m. precisely I would be vaporised in a process called ‘renewal’. Actually, it didn’t say that it said something about three points on my licence. Same difference.
I screeched into Guildford yelling, ‘Come on, get out of the way, I’ve got a speeding course to get to,’ as old ladies dived for cover. At the Holiday Inn, I joined 24 other downtrodden members of the squeezed middle who had handed over £95 and raced to an annoying location at an impossible time to avoid points. We sat, heads hanging in defeat, until a lady in a snazzy patterned cardie marched into the conference room.
‘You’re very quiet! Come on, tell each other your names, you’re going to be here for four hours!’ Silence. ‘It’s not detention, you know!’ ‘What the hell is it then?’ I wanted to ask.
‘My name’s Hazel. And I’m here because I work for AA DriveTech. I suppose you’re here because you got unlucky. Hmm? Is that your story?’
‘God, give me strength, I’m not going to get through this,’ I thought. ‘Maybe if I just stare at the projector screen and emotionally shut down…’
Everyone else must have thought that, too, because Hazel couldn’t get a word out of any of us.
‘What’s the speed limit on a rural single? Hmm?’ Silence. ‘What’s the speed limit for a HGV on the motorway? Hmm?’ Silence. ‘It’s not what you know, it’s what you don’t know,’ she kept saying. Then: ‘You’re looking, but you’re not seeing!’ After the fifth time she said this, I started to get a tight feeling in my chest.
We broke for tea but there was no food, which I assume was part of a strategy to keep us both desperate and docile. It didn’t work. We started to get restive. The yummy mummies were becoming particularly mutinous.
Hazel showed us the scene of an accident and told us that a driver waiting to turn right had turned the steering wheel while stationary. ‘Is that good driving?’ she said. I shook my head. I didn’t know why. But I sensed she wanted a headshake, and I had made a decision to give Hazel what she wanted. But the yummy mummies were revolting. ‘Yes, I think it is,’ said a particularly obnoxious one. ‘Oh, you do,’ said Hazel. ‘Hmm.’
The two women stared at each other like cowboys at the OK Corral. Neither blinked. ‘Come on, Hazel! You get ’em!’ I found myself thinking. ‘Well,’ said Hazel, ‘you’re wrong. When a car ran into the back of him it shunted him across the carriageway and he was hit by an oncoming articulated lorry. He died instantly.’ The yummy mummy bristled. She puffed herself up. She pouted. ‘Well,’ she said, ‘I still think turning your wheels while you’re waiting is good driving.’ At which point I decided that no matter what happened I was with The Cardie. Hazel, my heroine, then showed us some crash tests. In each one, they mowed down a cardboard cut-out pedestrian at different speeds.
‘I don’t agree with that test,’ said a silver-haired man in a suit. ‘It’s stupid. The stopping distances are wrong. You’d break earlier if you saw that girl.’ ‘She’s cardboard, you idiot,’ I wanted to scream. ‘It’s a crash test. Hazel knows her crash tests. How dare you insinuate she’s got it wrong. Come on, Haze, sock it to him.’ But Hazel let it go.
We moved on to what to do about tail-gaters. In full goody-two-shoes mode now, I suggested that indicating left and pulling over was the correct response to being hassled from behind. The yummies gave me a look that said I was a slimy teacher’s pet. ‘Exactly right,’ said Hazel, giving me a smile.
‘I’m sorry, but that’s ridiculous,’ said a yummy. ‘There is no way I’m pulling over in a dark street with my children in the back of the car.’ Come on, Hazel, get her…
‘So, instead of pulling over, you’d speed up, and risk crashing and killing someone else’s child? That’s a terrible decision to make.’
‘Yes! It is!’ said yummy, with venom. I didn’t know what Hazel could possibly have left in her armour, but suddenly she waxed philosophical. During a discussion of stopping distances she stared intensely at us and said, ‘Put time back in its place.’ Is that Einstein or Derrida? It’s brilliant, whatever it is. AA DriveTech — the UK’s leading provider of spacetime continuum theory.
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