To B or not to B

s a driving instructor,




it's appropriate that I've arrived at a kind of crossroads in my life.

As a driver, I'd deal with such things as crossroads in good time and be prepared for whatever was there well in advance. If only things were that simple. In fact I procrastinated, and did almost nothing, until inertia chose my route for me.

Still a choice, I suppose, choosing to do nothing, but it did limit my options.

Every 4 years, us instructors have to give the government £300 for the priviledge of doing our jobs. My license expires today, and a new one had to be arranged if I was to continue teaching.

At the same time, my car lease was due to expire in a few weeks. If I chose to teach, I'd be locking myself into a 2 year lease on a dual controlled car.

So, these things together meant that if I'd wanted to go in a different direction, this was probably the time to do it.

And I have considered doing that. Being a driving instructor has not been that rewarding financially. The job, like almost any job, has become mundane. The benefits of not having to do a 9-5 shift with a boss telling me what to wear and how to act have to be set against the effort and responsibility of doing it all for myself. As Bren said when she hoovered carpets in our local bowling alley, you turn up, you do what you're paid to do, and you go home. Easy.

I did enquire about becoming a driving examiner. They are civil servants. They work for the Driving Standards Agency. It seemed like a logical progression, but they're not taking on new examiners right now. My name is on file, they say.

But that's all I did, and so in due course, I did what I needed to do, and I'm now set to be an instructor for the next couple of years at least. I'm now licensed until the end of July 2014, and I've got a shiny new Ford Fiesta sitting outside.

There are worse jobs. I've had some of them.

This, by the way, is my hundredth post of 2010. I hope that somewhere in there I've had something to say.

And I've almost completed my Google Earth alphabet (upper case) too.

Bravo!

But now, basically I'm bogged down betwixt and between a bevvy of beautiful B's.

It's a bugger of a burden to bear.

Do I brighten things with this beauty from Ulan Bator?



Or do I bat that into oblivion, and base it upon this, between Biggleswade and Baldock?



Blimey!

Both are abstract, but they are each recognisably B's, at least to an extent that I'm happy with. I know I'm going to use one or the other. So now seems a good time to recap on my methodology.

It would have been fairly easy to just find shapes, or even real letters that I found. But I set myself some rules, some of which I've occasionally bent or broken (are you listening, Q?)

They are:

• I can't use real letters, such as those painted on airport runways. That also rules out things like the letters from the famous "HOLLYWOOD" sign.

• The letter has to be both whole and constrained. For example, if I found a particularly bendy bit of road, I couldn't use it as an S or a N, because the road would continue beyond the letter.

• Less of a rule, and more of a convention, I have to try to make each letter come from different places and different... well... things I suppose. So if I found the letters Z, F, W, L and P in the bunkers of a golf course, I would try to use just one of them, especially if they were all from the same golf course.
  

The boundary line making the Mongolian B continues away somewhere else, making it something other than a B. So I'm going to have to choose the British B, because the shores of the lake form a boundary consistent with rule 2. And besides, it's between Baldock and Biggleswade, on the border of Bedfordshire.

abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz
ABCDEFGHIJKLMNOPQRSTUVWXYZ
1234567890

So where have I been?

Not posted for a few weeks, and I'm not even going to say I'm sorry.

Been to Wales with Dave, who was up for a few days. We got rat-arsed watching the world cup at an Anglesey campsite. Could have gone for something really bleak, but played it safe and went to a proper campsite. I got to drive Dave's car, a 1.8VTEC Honda Civic. And very nice it was too.

My own car is turning into a bag of crap. It smokes when you start it up. The aircon doesn't work properly. I feel like Hunter S Thompson after he trashed the cadillac, but the car has done over 70,000 miles now, and it does get treated badly.

What else? Well been failing to do things that really really need to be done.

And have been spending time doing things that don't need doing at all.

I applied to the DSA about becoming a driving examiner, but they're not taking anyone on at the moment. Given the current waiting lists, you'd think they'd be crying out for them, but no. they've kept my details on file. (Want to make the roads safer? Make everyone retake their test every 10 years. Just a thought. Might blog about it in more detail sometime.)

So I need to sort out re-registration as an ADI. I need to do my tax return. I need to decide what to do once the lease runs out on my current car in about 6 weeks, and I need to book some tests for people. All these things need to happen yesterday, and torn between them, I do none of them.

I did open my drawer in the living room today. The registration form should be in there. Perhaps tomorrow I will take it out of the drawer and put it on the sofa, or the mantlepiece.

Anything else? Well as a result of meeting Ray tonight, I've also re-established contact with another blast from the past. A guy called Steve Wood, who is now a nurse in Liverpool. Last time I saw him he was a sort of teddy boy.

The allottment continues to provide ever increasing amounts of tasty and nutricious food. Bren picked 5lbs of strawberries the other day, and made more jam than you could shake a shitty stick at. Also getting raspberries, redcurrants, various salad leaves, peas, potatoes, sweet peas, and tomatoes. We've hardly done any shopping for weeks.

Mind you, there's bugger all to eat, apart from jam, raspberries, redcurrants, various salad leaves, peas, potatoes, sweet peas, and tomatoes.

The shed got broken into last night. Since it wan't locked (no point when they are prepared to rip the roof off to get in) breaking in consisted of of moving a board and opening the door. The scumfucks that did it appear to have nicked one small hand tool. Silly buggers.

Also been arguing on the internet. This time about the role of the police. People seem to find it difficult to seperate the role from the person, so when they do bad things because of their role maintaining the status quo, it's taken as an attack on the very existence of any kind of police force. I found an excellent article about it by Merrick Godhaven right here.

And since this post is a series of disconnected things, I shall finish with a random image from google earth. Yes it's time to SPIN THE GLOBE!



It's a mountain in Mongolia! Where the kids all dress in black. The capital of Mongolia is Ulan Bator. The houses all seem to have little white rotundas in the gardens. Why???