Real life | 4 February 2016

If these speed awareness courses get much more entertaining and informative they might become a dangerous incentive to break the limit just to get on to them.

I qualified for my second one by doing 35 in a 30 at night in a strange place. Being lost and mercilessly tailgated as I crawled along a pitch dark country lane, I turned right to find a place to pull over and before I realised I was in a residential street, a camera flashed me.

Two months later, I was one of 23 people sitting in a faceless office suite inside a multistorey car park in Guildford with Janice, let’s call her, in majestic command of a laser pointer and a PowerPoint display.

I looked around me and observed that my cohorts were the most boring, nerdy, garden edge-trimming, Jamie Oliver cookbook devotees I think I have ever seen. You couldn’t have assembled a more diligent-looking bunch of tooth flossers if you had commissioned YouGov to find the 23 people least likely to do anything in any way threatening to the fabric of society.

‘Here we all are,’ I thought, as I surveyed this sorry bunch of nose-hair trimmers. ‘The upstanding citizens of Middle Britain, happy to be caught on camera and done up like a kipper.’

When our great-great-grandchildren ask how the second dark age came about, their teachers will have to explain that their ancestors couldn’t do much about civilisation unravelling because they were all detained in a National Speed Awareness Course at the time, sitting there with their vending-machine coffee cups, which they would later dispose of in the correct bin selected from a triumvirate of bins marked ‘mixed recycling’, ‘plastics’ and ‘used cups’.