The online speed awareness course cost £101, or a few pounds less if you didn’t want to book ‘flexible’ so you could change it if something went wrong, which it was bound to.
Quite how companies like the AA, which deliver these courses, divvy up the spoils with the police I have no idea. I don’t want to know. I just want to be left alone once they’ve all got what they want out of me.
Naturally, when I logged into this course at the appointed time I couldn’t get the camera working on my laptop. Obviously, I had to phone my IT guy and he had to get me to download a program which allowed him to access my laptop remotely.
‘Slide the slider!’ he kept saying. ‘What slider?’ ‘You’ve got your camera covered! They’ll be a slider!’ ‘There’s no slider!’ Calm down!’ shouted the course organiser, whose face I could see in a little window.
Eventually, I found a slider above the lens and slid it. I was in. The course organiser scanned my driving licence and there I sat in a rogues’ gallery with five other wretched souls who had been caught doing speeds of 30 and 40mph, and whose blank faces stared from their little windows like so many convicts in prison. All except one. One chap rather amusingly had his camera trained on the top of his forehead throughout.
This load of mugs and me, we all had one thing in common. We were going slow, but not slow enough. They ought to call it a Slowness Awareness Course.
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