What I learned on my speed awareness course

Speed is in my blood. My father, grandfather and great-grandfather all used to race cars in their youth. We even have a hill-climb specialist car part-named after us, the Dellow. Just after I’d passed my test, my dad let me share the driving in his V12 Jag en route to our holiday home in Devon. I vividly remember him rebuking me whenever I let the speedometer dial creep below 100mph.

So I suppose it was inevitable that naughty habits would catch up with me in the end and that I’d find myself doing one of those compulsory speed awareness courses.

If there’s one thing every boy racer who has yet to experience one knows, SACs are a massive waste of time. They’re run by embittered ex-coppers with PTSD who torture you with bad jokes and treat you like children. You learn nothing except nannying safety propaganda. They’re so bad and so boring that frankly you’d be better off taking the three penalty points on your licence, rather than submit yourself to those four hours of purgatory.

So you can imagine my surprise when my father told me about the SAC which, by coincidence, he’d recently been forced to attend. ‘I found it really interesting,’ he said. ‘There was lots of useful stuff I didn’t know. The woman in charge was funny and engaging. It made me rethink my driving.’

Naturally I put this down to incipient senility. Or perhaps that feminisation that strikes men in their mid-eighties, making them suddenly more nervous and risk-averse. What I didn’t at all expect, till I went on the course, was that my dad would prove absolutely right.

It took place in one of those anonymous, empty conference hotels off the ring road at the edge of town.