At the end of my driving lesson,
I booked the next for the following weekend and then spent the week undoing all
of the good work I had achieved. You may
remember that last time I was expounding my theory of 'beginner's luck', in
which the subconscious hunts around for examples of good practice in the
absence of any previous experience to go on?
I don't know about you, but I always find that the price to be paid for
a session of 'beginner's luck' is an instalment of 'follow-up failure'.
I spent the week between my first
and second driving lessons carefully going over and over again, in my mind, what
happened. Common sense would say that,
in doing this, you should focus on the positive aspects of the lesson and try
to build on these, but I just don't seem to work like that. My mind always homes in on any negative
remarks and dwells on these to the exclusion of everything else. You may recall that my driving instructor has
praised my road positioning but had described me as 'windy' for hanging back
behind parked vehicles when other traffic was coming in the opposite
direction. Therefore, I spent the week
going over and over in my mind how I could be more assertive in my driving,
which led me to think deeply about biting points and clutch use, steering and
indicators and the whole panoply of driving related actions. Not unsurprisingly, after a week of this, I
was like a coiled spring and, by the following Saturday, would have been hard
pushed to put one foot in front of the other without serious injury, let alone
control something as complex as a car.
Once again, I was waiting by our
front room window, getting increasingly anxious as the hour approached. As it turned out, I really need not have
worried. Not because the lesson went
well, but because it didn't happen at all.
As the appointed hour came and
went, I peered this way and that in the hope of seeing the car arrive. It didn't.
Half an hour passed, and then an hour, and still no sign. In this modern age of instant connectivity,
this sort of situation would be incomprehensible but then, in the absence of
mobile telephones, or any phone at all in our case, it was by no means
unusual. Dad, took it upon himself to go
and telephone from the call box, although the cynic in me suggested that this
was a heaven-sent opportunity for him to escape to the pub. Much later, he returned with the story of
some sort of mistake having been made in the diary, with apologies all
round. The lesson would now be the same
time, the following week.
Driving a car is not like riding
a bicycle or swimming. This is not the
first in a series of statements of the blindingly obvious, just an observation
that in those two cases, once you've 'got it', you've 'got it'. That's not the case with driving; you need to
keep practicing to etch the actions into your subconscious so that it all
becomes automatic. As we didn't have a car at the time,
practicing was out of the question, so all I could do was wait anxiously for
the next lesson.
I was delighted when Geoff, my
driving instructor, actually put in an appearance the following Saturday. Ok, he was a quarter of an hour late, but at
least he had shown up. If I was delighted,
that certainly did not describe Geoff's mood after a couple of minutes. Clearly he had been led into a false sense of
security by my previous efforts and had expected a simple, smooth path to test
success. As we kangarooed our way to the
nearest test route, it was clear that he was going to have an uphill struggle
with me. Therefore, it was no surprise
to be asked to stop at a pub on the way home as he just had to "see
someone about something".
TO BE CONTINUED
You can find all Philip's books at either his UK Amazon Author Page or at the Amazon.com Author Page
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