Woke up... Fell out of bed...

This is my pupil, Laura's friend's house.

As we drove past Laura's friend's house yesterday, Laura pointed it out to me. In doing so, she veered over towards the wrong side of the road, straight into the path of an oncoming Vauxhall Astra. I had to instantly grab the wheel. Holy fuck. That was a close one. In my previous accidents, I've always been hit from behind. A head on collision is not something I want to happen any time soon. Combined closing speeds would have been somewhere around 60-70 miles per hour and it would have been a bad 'un, airbags or not. Honestly, you can't switch off for a second in this job.

Anyway, day two of the rest of my life, and all that. Yesterday's alcohol intake = 0.

Woke up at 6.30 with a mouth like... well something other than a budgie cage. Didn't get up and turn on PC. Hit snooze twice and grabbed an extra 16 minutes in bed instead.

Got up, got dressed. Had coffee. Opened mail - We're going to be getting a lot more tax credits, due to my earnings being so much less than predicted.

Went to pick up Scott, who had an early test.

He failed, on the same roundabout that he failed on last time, for pretty much the same reasons - nerves causing him to approach too quickly.

Took him home dejected and disgruntled. Got in about 9.30 and phoned parent of potential pupil that I didn't get the chance to call back yesterday due to my phone being a bit buggered.

New pupils starting monday. Hooray!

Made coffee.

Turned on PC so that I could blog this and catch the responses to a couple of things I posted yesterday. Not going on facebook or anything. Will be switching off computer and going to allottment when I finish this post.

Next lesson is at 12. Another test. Then straight to Bromborough for a lesson from 3 to 5.

Then done for the day. I want to take some photos of my little hideyhole so I'm not going to clean it up today although I plan to soon, despite intending to spend less time in here.


It's actually quite hard all this. Where I'd normally and automatically head to my room and the familiarity it represents, I have to do something jarringly other, whatever it may be.

Well, I picked a big bouquet of sweet peas, and filled a polystyrene container with raspberries, then took them home and left for my next appointment.

Another fail. Great driver, but one mistake cost him a pass. On another day, the lights would have stayed green, and he'd now be a fully qualified driver. Possibly just as well, since his dad had promised me a bottle of whiskey if he'd passed today.

The 3-5 lesson turned into 3-4. Got home about 4.20. Went online to order a load of business cards, and had a very brief surf, then spent more time down at the allottment, via the chippy.

It's now 7 O clock. I'm writing up the test fails for the bloggy part of my website, and will be trying to put a load of links to my website from other places.

So I'm not knocking the internet completely on the head. Just trying to make it more normal. So the sticky game sites that require daily participation are gone.

Bren is due back this evening. Don't know what time. Quite late I think. I hope she likes the flowers.

When I have finished doing the blog stuff, I shall go do some tidying up.

Then what? Telly? A good book? Maybe I should let the dice decide.

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Mock the wife

I don't remember exactly how it came about. I was talking about a lesson I did, and Bren reckoned she'd be good at bay parking, but possibly not as good at parallel parking.

Next thing you know, we're on out way to the test centre. She's driving the car I teach in, and I'm doing a full blown mock test on her.

Now some people you can't teach. I can't teach Bren to drive the way I'd teach my pupils. She already has her own ideas, and the interpersonal dynamic makes it impossible. But the mock is a different ballgame. I'm not trying to teach her anything. I'm just putting her through a set-piece course, playing the role of examiner the best I can, and marking her driving according to the same criteria I'd use on anyone else.

I tend to use the same route (more or less) for each pupil, and I've been doing this job long enough now to know what criteria the examiners use.

Bren was surprised to find she had butterflies in her stomach as we prepared to set off. Nerves did cause her to do certain things differently to how she'd normally do them to some extent, although she never made any directly serious errors.

She did fail the mock test though, because she wasn't checking her blind spot before moving off. She moved off safely each time, but the examiners, at least as far as I'm aware would mark each missed check as a minor fault, and because the same minor fault kept occurring, it became a serious fault.

She also found that the parallel park she thought she'd be OK with was a little more tricky than she anticipated.

This was the cause of much hilarity!

Because she was able to get herself close to and parallel to the kerb with a bit of to-ing and fro-ing, she only got minor faults for this bit, and to be fair, it was a tricky manoevre, because of a parked car on the opposite side of the road limiting the space available, and because a car came, and she felt rushed.

She's not a bad driver by any means. I think the vast majority of drivers, if forced to retake their tests, would fail unless they took a couple of lessons first to get rid of their bad habits.

Roundabouts

Roundabouts are a fine way of  connecting several roads to each other. By allowing everything to flow, they increase the capacity of junctions. They result in less stopping and starting, and therefore help to reduce fuel consumption and pollution. Having a big round space in the middle, they can be landscaped. Roundabouts are prettier than Crossroads.

Many of my local roundabouts have informal names associated with their appearance or proximity to other features. Ask anyone from Wallasey where the B and Q roundabout is, and they will send you pretty unerringly to Junction 1 of the M53, which has a big box retail park right next to it. The Clown roundabout is so called because it has a metal sculpture of a clown like figure.

I also have names for some of them that probably nobody else does.

Here, for example, is the Hairdryer Roundabout.

I call it that because the roadsign looks like a 1950's style hairdryer.

This is the Sad Rock Roundabout.

There is another sad rock on the other side of the roundabout.

This roundabout has now been resurfaced in a lovely red coloured apshalt.

It didn't stay red for long though. I call it the Birdshit roundabout.

So roundabouts are many things. They are a way of streamlining junctions. They are a source of humour. They are a blank canvas for gardeners and graffitti artists.

And they are trouble. I've lost more pupils because of roundabouts than for any other reason.

Here's why:

Experienced drivers do things at the right time. They work to the gaps. Learners can't necessarily do this. They look to the right and they see cars coming. Then they keep looking at the cars and they panic.

At T junctions, if you haven't had time to get yourself sorted, you can always stop, do what you need to do, make sure it's clear, and go. But this is potentially dangerous at roundabouts, because the person behind you is also likely to be looking right, and may well smack straight into the back of you if you sto pwhen you shouldn't. Two of the three accidents I've been involved in as an instructor have happened exactly this way. Someone looking right has assumed we would go, and for some reason we've stopped instead, and have been hit from behind a second or so later.

If I get a new pupil, and they tell me that they're struggling with say, reversing around corners, I'd generally get them reversing round corners. If I got them to do hill starts instead, I would not really be addressing their needs. (If, while driving to the corner I wanted them to reverse around, they buggered up a hill start, then dealing with hill starts might be a legitimate lesson plan) but if I meet a new pupil, and they tell me they are frightened of roundabouts, I'm left in a quandary.

Do I try to meet their fears head on? Or do I try to find some oblique way of doing it? It's a tough call, and whatever I try, I risk either destroying my pupil's confidence, or not dealing with what needs to be dealt with.

Update: I had a lesson last Monday that resulted in an incident where my pupil attempted to pull out in front of someone. I wrote this post kind of in anticipation. In due course, I got a text message cancelling tomorrow's remedial lesson, and citing a sudden interview (you found out about an interview on a Sunday??? Really?) This lady insists that she hasn't given up, but is unable to rearrange her lesson because she doesn't know her shifts yet.

Well of course not. She might even be telling the truth. But I doubt it. I wish people would just be straight with me.

How to fail your driving test....

You, the eagle eyed reader, will no doubt be aware that one of the tags/labels/subjects of this blog relates to driving, and specifically, how people have failed their driving tests.

Being loosely based around google earth, and it's associated features, I've tended to provide images of how and where things went wrong.

So far, I've only done three posts on this subject, but today, while driving today's abject failure home from his test, I had the idea of really expanding the concept. I had visions of an all-singing, all dancing site, with it's own domain name, where people could post their own experiences, but then I realised that all I needed to do was set up another blog.

This one is a semi-commercial venture - one that would direct people living locally to me for driving lessons, as well as providing useful information on how not to do something, and by negation, how to do something.

So it will probably carry advertising too, unlike this blog, which proudly doesn't.

http://howtofailyourdrivingtest.blogspot.com/

So far all that's there is a name. No real formatting or anything. And no posts as yet. But if it turns out to be a popular resource for learner drivers, it might become fairly frequently visited.

Update: 5th June...

Well, it's underway, and I've got it off to a good start, with 10 posts that establish a format and will provide an ever growing body of information. The tag cloud will become a useful way for anyone who's failed their test to look up any marked faults, and get advice on why they were marked this way, and how to do it better next time.

It's a way of promoting myself as a knowledgeable instructor, and provides contact details.

Later, if I sort out my own school, It can be linked into any web presence I have, as well as directing people to my website.

When the content is a little more comprehensive, I will start to promote the site much more. For now, I don't really want to "stumbleupon" it or pay for advertising, but it does make me stand out from the usual slew of driving instructor websites.

Google Earth used in anger!

On Saturday, one of my pupils failed his driving test.

In this instance, he needed to pass quickly because he works antisocial hours in a little village well off the public transport routes. He was not happy about it, and his anger has continued since. He felt the serious fault he was given was harsh, and wanted my advice about whether to appeal the decision.

But I wasn't sat in the back on the test, so it was hard for me to say whether his driving had been fairly marked or not.

So there I am on the phone, with the computer in front of me, while John, the guy wot failed was sat in front of another computer 10 miles away.

I found the junction and so did he, and we were able to work out precisely what had happened.

As you can see, it was a one way street. What John did was move over to the left. This turned the junction from a crossroads into a staggered junction, so he signalled right and then left when he should have positioned himself directly towards the road he wanted to go in to.

So the examiner was correct, and John now realises his mistake.

It was interesting to use the technology in this way, to clarify a situation without actually having to visit the scene.

There are some things money just can't buy...

First things first. This morning one of my pupils had her driving test. She failed because of two serious faults. One was the subject of a previous post. The other was because she tried to emerge to the right from a T junction at the same time as a vehicle from her left turned right into the side road she was emerging from. She ended up stopping in the middle of the road. The examiner reckoned she should have waited. She reckoned they didn't signal right until the last moment.

After that, I had a lesson with a lady who has her test in a couple of days. I wanted her to reverse around a corner, and we went here...



See? Lot's of options. This is the kind of road examiners use, because if there's a parked car at one corner, they can use the next one, or the next...

Because I wanted her to do it for herself, I amused myself with making anagrams of the road names. Durban Road is an anagram of "A dour Brand". Glencoe Road is an anagram of "Eagle Condor"

Just thought I'd give you a little insight into the care and attention I put into my job :o)

This afternoon, I did a complete pass plus course. I used my usual complete pass plus course, going to Glossop and the Snake Pass.

The pub I usually schedule a meal break for was shut. Not a problem. I already knew it would be, and I had a plan B ready and waiting.

The Grouse Inn between Glossop and Hayfield.

That was shut up tight too.

OK. We'd passed any number of hostelries offering home cooked food on our way. So we tried another in New Mills. It may well serve food on Mondays, but it didn't open until 5pm. We weren't going to sit twiddling our thumbs for an hour, so we got on with driving.

I took a diversion from our normal route and went through a place called Charlesworth.

This was a fantastic part of the drive. The road was the sort of thing they use for car adverts. The scenery was breathtaking. I intend to go back there with my significant other and take a nice walk. Soon.

We ended up in Marple Bridge, which had a pub, which advertised food, and it's doors were open.

We ended up just having coke, because they don't serve food on Mondays. Cant' blame them really. The place was empty. The only other people apart from staff were an elderly couple who walked in as we were leaving. I had a fag in the car park and they came back out again. I heard them say "Well we'll just have to have fish and chips then".

I gave up. You can't buy pub food in rural Derbyshire on a monday afternoon. End of.

We drove around the north of Manchester in a spectacular hailstorm. (bad weather pass plus module nirvana) before heading back on the East Lancs.

But then things got really dangerous. We were heading west into the setting sun on wet roads, and it was almost impossible to see what was happening ahead. I got us off the road at a budget food pub near Haydock on the outskirts of Liverpool, and we spent half an hour killing two birds (getting the promised meal sorted, and giving the sun time to fuck off out of the sky)

Seriously. If you can't see where you're going, don't go.

Reading Road Markings...

You're driving from Left to Right approaching this junction, and have been asked to turn right at the end of the road. It's your driving test and you're nervous. If you're a driver, you can appreciate that this is not a straightforward junction. You're actually dealing with a T junction that joins a one way street, and then immediately dealing with turning right at the end of that one way street. The situation is made slightly more complex by the junction on the left abutting the first bit of the junction.



Ultimately, you're trying to go from the first yellow arrow to the second, and there are several ways of getting this wrong, as well as the usual ways of doing a junction wrongly.

First of all, you're initially going down a two-way road, but ahead of you, you can see a one way street. So it's easy to assume that you're already on a one way street. Moving onto the wrong side of the road before you get to the first part of the junction is the commonest way of failing here. And the examiners do have to fail you for it. You're driving down the wrong side of the road on approach to quite a blind corner. If someone turned left into the street from the one way bit, you could have a head on collision. The clue is the dotted lines at the end of the road. There's a double row on the left hand side of the road, but only a single row on the right hand side.

The second way of bollocking this up is to treat the whole thing as two-way. You get the first bit right, but then you incorrectly keep to the left lane as you turn right at the end. This is less dangerous, but the examiners will still mark it as a serious driving fault. You can tell it's the end of a one way street because the double row of dotted lines extend across the full width of the junction, and there are two give way triangles, one in each lane.

Thirdly and finally, you can attempt to turn right at the end of the first bit instead of the second, heading the wrong way into a one way street. There are some nice red no entry signs to help you avoid doing this, but should you miss them, you've got a good chance of smashing head on into a bus. The examiner would probably mark this as a reason to fail you.