The builder boyfriend sat nervously in front of my laptop as I logged him in to do his speed awareness course.
I sat him at the kitchen table, I clicked the link the speed course people sent him and then, as we waited for them to admit him, I began my pep talk: ‘Do not say anything political. Do not joke. Joking is the worst thing you could possibly do.’ I had already decided this was going to end badly.
How could the builder boyfriend button his lip long enough to get through a three-hour online speed awareness course – the result of a trip to the UK to do a roofing job – without being reported to the police for coming out with something you are not allowed to say any more?
How could he manage to have some po-faced, overpaid functionary lecture him about the non-crime he had committed – driving at 32mph – without eventually bursting with the anger of the righteous working man and telling the merciless technocrats who still manage to rule us, even though we have moved to West Cork, what he thinks of them?
He would be speaking for millions if he did give them a piece of his mind. But the whole object of this course being to avoid points and higher insurance, I urged him to remain focused on affecting compliance, no matter how preposterous things got.
The poor chap looked wretched, sitting in front of a conference-calling software program he doesn’t understand with a screwed up half-packet of cough sweets, a cup of instant coffee, an old pen hardly working and a scrap of paper he’d pulled out of his work jeans pocket to write on. How dare they take his dignity in this way.
I placed an A3 notepad down and said he should use that, for I know, having done the same course a few weeks before, because I also visited the UK recently and made the mistake of doing 40 on a dual carriageway, that they make you hold up your notes to show you are fully participating. I didn’t think holding up an old receipt for a chainsaw blade with a doodle of an idea for a barn conversion on it would help, necessarily.
‘Answer the questions. Be polite. And remember, do not tell any jokes.’
‘No, all right, I know,’ he said, and then, staring at the screen like it was alchemy: ‘What is happening? What does that mean?’ And he pointed to a logo telling him he was going to be admitted soon. ‘You’re in the waiting room,’ I explained. ‘Ridiculous,’ he said.
We sat there for a bit, he sipped his coffee, the dogs came and went, wagging their tales, trying to get his attention, and then he lost patience.
‘I know that road is a 30. I was doing 30. I was crawling along so slow as I went up that hill I didn’t think I was going to get up it. They put a camera at the top of the hill. The dirty rotten…’ Lots of swearing.
‘…32 miles an hour…That’s not speeding. There were people running past me carrying spears going faster than me.’
Now, that is an example of the sort of joke that I was trying to avoid him blurting out live on screen. He merely meant to illustrate that he was going so slowly that Stone Age man was overtaking him. But it could be misconstrued.
I had a feeling the leader of a speed course would misconstrue it. And the very next moment, the course leader popped up and a lady with a very foreign name announced herself in a very thick accent.
She was more than a bit hard to understand. The BB handled it beautifully, for he has impeccable manners. He introduced himself and said how relieved he was that he had logged in correctly. But the lady was not having it. As I collected up the dogs to leave, ducking (or so I thought) beneath the screen, she shouted: ‘NO, NO, NO! You have people in the room! You not allowed to have people in the room!’
The builder b said: ‘My wife is just getting the dogs out of the way.’
‘NO!’ the woman yelled. ‘You have someone in the room for registration so that invalidate registration! You have dogs? You not allowed dogs!’ And she continued shouting a rapid-fire volley of what would be termed ‘abuse’ if it was coming the other way, from him to her.
The BB sounded as though he wanted to cry. ‘I didn’t think we had started yet…’ ‘Listen to me!’ she yelled. ‘This is registration and you invali-DATE! YOU INVALIDATE!’
‘But I can’t work computers,’ he pleaded. ‘My wife had to sit with me until the thing connected because I didn’t understand how to do it…’ ‘NO NO NO!’ she shouted.
I ran away and cowered outside the kitchen. A few minutes later he came out ashen-faced and said he was going to shut himself in another room with a lock on the door in case I came into the kitchen by mistake over the next three hours.
He said the lady had put him back in the waiting room and would re-admit him in ten minutes. He had to click the link again to re-join. This time he would have to cope on his own, because if she saw or heard me, that would be curtains.
I sat miserably on the stairs next to the room he was in, thinking: ‘This is all wrong. I’m not even sure three points for 32 in a 30 on a badly signed road would hold up in court. He’s being treated like the worst kind of criminal. This is an Orwellian form of re-education, a brainwashing…’
He must have worked out how to click the link for he did not come out for three hours. I went about my day and came back into the kitchen after doing the horses to find him making himself a cup of tea.
He looked shattered. ‘How was it?’ I said. ‘You didn’t make any jokes did you?’ ‘Jokes?’ he said, his hair standing on end, his face red with annoyance. ‘The whole thing was a joke. At one point she told us that in order to not be distracted by her grandchildren in the back of the car she gave them tablets.’
‘You mean she sedates them?’ ‘You would think. But then she said…,’ and he did the rapid yelling voice: ‘I do not want you to think I drug my grandchildren. I am talking about the iPads!’
‘That is quite funny,’ I said, changing my opinion of her slightly.
‘She wasn’t joking. When we all laughed she told us not to laugh because giving children tablets was no laughing matter. If we laughed we would be thrown off the course.’
‘Well, as long as you didn’t do the joke about the spears.’
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