What an aptly named place Hook junction is. My mind wandered for only a few seconds but that was enough to land me in peril. I was driving down the A3 and as the road narrowed from three lanes to two I failed to slow quickly enough. At the precise moment the road goes from a 70 to a 50 there is a camera and I had only slowed to 61 as I passed it. Captain Hook was not actually on the bridge above the speed camera yelling ‘ahaaaa, me hearties!’ in anticipation of his booty but he might as well have been. I have been driving on this road for ten years and have never made this mistake before. But that was not admissible as an excuse. Nor was the fact that my mind had only wandered because I was worrying about getting home before the teenage looters started marauding.
No matter. At the very moment the lawless yobs were getting stuck in, I was breaking the speed limit in my very own moment of madness. No prizes for guessing which one — yob or driver — would get the swiftest and most soul-crushing justice.
I wish a few of those delinquents had got the letter I did ordering me to pay £95 and enter myself on a humiliating driver improvement course, with all the nightmarish petty bureaucracy that entailed.
It would have frightened young Kaylee, Latisha and DeShaun far more than a judge telling them they might go to jail for a few days or have to do some community service.
Tell them they have to manage their own punishment by wading through endless forms and registering for courses and see how they shape up. Pretty quick, I would imagine.
The most chilling thing about the justice that came down on me was the cheerfulness of it. I was offered three options of varying awfulness which I could select like a schoolboy being told by the headmaster that he could have one whack without trousers or six with.
But along with the stern formal letter from Surrey Police calling me an ‘offender’ there was a bizarre second letter which treated me as if I had been selected for the Reader’s Digest prize draw.
This letter was bright yellow and had a big print logo that said: ‘together driving road safety’. There is literally no way of deciphering what that means. It is more incomprehensible to me than advanced Mandarin.
Next to that was a jaunty speech bubble: ‘Don’t want to have points on your licence? Why not attend a Speed Awareness Course instead…’
This course promised to give me, the offender, the ‘opportunity’ to attend an educational workshop as an alternative to a £60 fine and three points. If I did the course I would not get points, but I would have to pay £95 instead of £60. I thought that this might be to cover the cost of the course but it emerged that the course would be extra.
This is a bit rum, if you ask me. If I went for the big fine and the course, I would be given an ‘opportunity’ to select a date that was convenient to me. It would be no longer than four hours and take place at a convenient location. The tone made it seem as if the people who did the course were a better class of speeder than the drop-outs who opted for points. So why did they have to pay a bigger fine?
It got weirder. On the back there was a diagram of figures in silhouette who looked like extraterrestrials. They had big heads, tummies and bottoms, short legs with bobbly feet and very long arms holding speech bubbles saying things like ‘No points on my licence meant I kept my job and my insurance premiums weren’t affected!’ ‘The trainers were friendly and they didn’t lecture or preach!’ ‘The experience was not only enjoyable but thoroughly worthwhile!’ Leaving aside the whole issue of why aliens from another planet had been found on Britain’s roads, and why these aliens had, apparently, managed to find jobs and insurance cover, it started to sound as if I was lucky to have been caught speeding.
I had not realised there were quite so many ‘opportunities’ in being done by a speed camera. If I had learning difficulties, for example, there would be a world of help at my disposal. I was tempted to put something, just to get my money’s worth. I thought about revealing that I suffer from the little documented but very widespread reaction-slowing condition known as Female Hormonal Attention Deficit Disorder, but then I remembered that Jim Davidson got banned from driving for writing a joke on one of these forms. FHADD is no laughing matter. But I suppose I had better keep quiet.
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