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.
I am not a practical person. I could no more get a job as a handyman than I could get a job as a wet nurse.
Still, it's nice to get off my arse and try stuff from time to time.
This particular experiment started at Wilkinsons. We went to buy hair dye, but I stubled upon the dylon, and, nostalgic for the wall hangings of my youth, I bought 3 packets of dye. Bright yellow, Flamingo pink, and Ocean blue.
Bren supplied an old cotton sheet and after some deliberation, I turned it into six 2 foot square pieces of fabric. I then did various things, and ended up with 6 pieces of tie dyed fabric. This actually worked reasonably well.
After more thought and discussion, I got Bren to sew them together, but the resultant tube was huge and unweildy. So she was sent back to her sewing machine to make it into a smaller tube, using just 4 of the panels.
Then it was time to show my ineptness at woodwork. I made some appropriately sized triangels of bamboo, and also got some hazel poles of the right length.
A thick wire was threaded throught the top and bottom of the tube, and the elements were brought together.
the resultant structure was extremely unstable. The slippy bamboo poles wanted to slip and twist, and the twine used to bind the things was crap. I finally got it to resemble a lamp sufficiently to try putting a light inside.
then, disaster struck! The flimsy structure twisted! The jute ties loosened! And our hours of work we all for nought!
The simple act of making a simple lamp, with shade had resulted in tears, a house turned upside down, and it still wasn't fit for purpose.
Further angst resulted when, in a fit of pique, I gently kicked the fallen, twisted thing, and one of our bamboo triangles, that Bren had struggled manfully with for a long time, became unattatched from itself. She complained that it was unfair, and she was right.
But the bamboo was the problem. I needed to make something of a fresh start.
I made new triangles by sawing more of the hazel poles, and these were far less slippery. Still the whole structure was constantly attempting to twist.
So in the end I deliberately twisted it. The top was rotated 180 degrees, so that the poles came together half way up the structure. these were lashed together firmly and the fabric tube was lowered over the structure.
So now I had a frame consisting of two triangle, one in direct opposition to the other, about 4 feet apart. The result was twisted but stable.
Stable enough to place lights inside and take some pictures.
But it is a work in progress. I want to untwist it, and make it stable by adding a third lateral triangle about half way up.
Me and Dave dropped a tab each, and went out for a walk. Twenty minutes later, and still firmly connected to planet Earth, we arrived here,
This little pub, right down on the Dee marshes was and is stripped down to the basics. It's too small to be anything but a place to drink, so there's no jukebox. No television. No fruit machine. Just tables and benches and a bar, and in the winter, a roaring fire. But this was summer, and we bought ourselves a pint of lager each.
Now I'm not the sort of person that can let a drink go unfinished. Not unless I fall asleep, but now, I was starting to feel the first gentle inklings that the little piece of paper I'd swallowed was going to do something. We left our drinks and walked back into town.
By the time we'd reached the town centre, I was feeling very strange indeed. It wasn't a particularly nice feeling. I was a bit paranoid. A bit confused. But I couldn't stop grinning. I felt like it must be obvious to everyone around that I was as high as a kite. Like there was a big red flashing arrow in the sky above my head shouting "HE'S HERE!!! HE'S TRIPPING!!!"
But then we got back to Dave's and shut the front door, and I was able to relax.
The precise order of events is somewhat unclear. What is clear is that this was a powerful hit. I remember listening to the Psychedelic Furs, "Sister Europe" and the phase effects in the song took me with them to some place far above the earth.
My eyes were closed, yet I could see an image in my mind that was as white as snow. Then the whiteness got sucked through my eyeballs to leave blackness, which in turn sucked through to leave the white again.
There was a clock on the wall. Black hands and black roman numerals with a plain white face and a round pale wooden surround. But now the white was icing, and the hands and numerals were blurring and sinking into it. The patterns in the carpet were writhing and coiling slowly past each other, and when we moved, we left vague image trails behind us, like a Harold Egerton strobe photograph made real.
I found myself incapable of working out what to do with a guitar, and quickly gave it up as a bad job. And I laughed constantly and loudly at the whole universe for what may have been anything between 10 minutes and 10,000 years.
Somewhere in all this, I had to go to the toilet. I crawled up the stairs, and had the most amazing poo of my life. Seriously, words cannot describe the sensation of moving your bowels while you're tripping your tits off.
And somewhere in all this, the phone rang. I was in the back room, laughing my head off, and the phone rang.
Somehow I knew the call was for me, and that it was bad news. Dave answered it, and then called me to the phone.
It was my sister, Kate. My Mum and Dad had been in a car crash. Could I go down and see them and make sure they're ok?
A minute earlier, I was somewhere beyond Saturn. Now I was 100% in the here and now. I promised that I would go down and see them a bit later, but that I couldn't go right at this moment. Turns out that they got sideswiped by someone changing lanes without looking. A bit shook up but otherwise uninjured. But keeping things together while I dealt with the call was not a problem. Somehow the drug just hit the pause button until I hung up. Then I was tripping again.
We watched Copeulation, a compilation of videos by Julian Cope. In the song, "Laughing Boy", the sky was doing exactly what the sky outside our window was doing.
We watched it again a few days later, when we were straight, and the sky in the video was still doing what the real sky was doing when we were tripping. Honestly, you'd think Julian Cope had taken acid or something.
What else is there to say? At some point, things peaked. Then there was a sort of plateau phase that went on for several hours. Then gradually, things became less intense, and perhaps 8 hours after we took the tabs, I was able to go down to see my folks and make sure they were ok.
It wasn't a comfortable visit. I'd also smoked a lot of pot while I was tripping, and I couldn't find much to say. We watched a wildlife programme on the telly. (big African skies doing a little of the same weird shimmering that I'd been seeing all afternoon, and then I made my excuses and headed back to Daves.
Some time around 3pm I went to bed, and surprisingly, slept pretty much straight away.
I've never ever done it again (I tried to once, but the tab I bought from some shady shit called John turned out to be a small square piece of carboard with a picture of a strawberry on it.
Usually, this doesn't matter too much. I try something else instead.
Yesterday evening though, things came together to make for one of the worse lessons I've even given.
It had actually been quite a good day. I had an early test, so I was up at half past six. My pupil passed. Another happy customer.
I should then have taught someone who I shall call Jan.
Jan has had some lovely lessons with me, but she's also struggled with nerves at times. She should have had her driving test today, but I felt she would be better off postponing it by a couple of weeks.
Jan had texted me earlier to put her lesson back to the evening instead, so I had a free couple of hours, then another driving test.
My pupil for this test also passed. 2 passes in one day is good going by any instructors standards.
Anyway, then I had the rearranged lesson with Jan, starting at about 5pm.
I had a vague idea that I wanted to get her driving outside her normal area, to see how well she would adapt. Unfortunately, getting her to drive outside her normal area, at rush hour, in the dark, was far more than she could deal with, and all I managed to do was to destroy her confidence.
Normally, at this point, I'd change things. Get her back in more familiar surroundings for a start. But I made more wrong decisions, and we ended up driving back along some pitch black country lanes.
Why? Well mainly it was because I was tired. I'd been up since 6.30 the previous day too, and I just wasn't thinking as well or as clearly as I usually do. Partly because we'd ended up in an area where I wasn't as accustomed to teaching. I know all the roads where we ended up, but not as naturally or as fluently as the roads around Wallasey. And sometimes the delay in working out a better way meant that we'd gone past the places where we could have gone a better way.
We got back, and I explained to Jan that the reason she'd had a bad lesson was because of the decisions I'd made, but that's going to be small comfort to her right now.
