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I was listening to the local news on the radio yesterday and there was a ‘top’ story where a certain high-street retailer/pharmacy was urging people to stock up on prescription medicines over the festive period.

Of course, on Saturday it was Big News that retailers were seeing an increase in shoppers but it was still a disastrous year and the sales are starting early to try and drag people in.

Maybe it’s just me, but this is about as cynical as you can get. The same store/pharmacy has previously advised people to throw medicines away if they have finished with them, and it is very big on stating the obvious (because not everything is obvious to a lot of people) – and yet its only defence here could be that it was talking about old medicines before, and now it is thinking of the Christmas shutdown.

Of course, poor recent sales wouldn’t have anything at all to do with it…

Just came home between lessons and started to channel-hop. Channel 4 has T4: McFly’s Greatest Hits Live – it’s 10.55am now and this is on until 11.25am, so I guess the show is at least an hour long!

You’d think that anything involving McFly’s greatest hits would be right up there with Great Swiss Naval Victories and Wars That France Didn’t Lose. Very short.

There has to be a full moon tonight! Incredibly, I just looked it up and there is.

We’ve been cut up more times today than in the whole of the preceding month, or so it seems. It started at a roundabout with roadworks on it – people too stupid to realise one lane was closed, so they just had to squeeze in just one extra car ahead just before the diversion sign instead of stopping and dropping in behind (one idiot woman in particular, who then got herself boxed completely in by returning to the lane which was blocked off). This was during the early part of rush hour.

Next, a business plank in a plankmobile decided he would just drive out of his workplace car park in heavy traffic right in front of my pupil. The fact that it was a pupil made him do it, but his tiny plank brain wasn’t able to work out that learners have difficulty in stopping. This was during rush hour.

Then, the same pupil was cut up by an idiot leaving a house in West Bridgford in a pale blue Vauxhall (Meriva, I think) registration no. WF07 KWV. This pillock reversed out into traffic, levelled up on the wrong side of the road, accelerated on the wrong side, and then cut in front of my pupil (obviously, the idiot was breaking the speed limit to do this).

It wasn’t until I wrote this that I realised the moon looked quite big and the ‘full moon’ concept occurred to me. It makes you wonder, doesn’t it?

Traditionally, driving instructors have not been noted for their intellectual prowess. But nowadays, you can add courtesy and basic human decency to the list of things they’re not very good at. Intelligence is still right at the top, though.

The other day I was with a pupil and we’d stopped in a convenient place for her to practice the Turn In The Road exercise. We’d been there for about a minute when another learner car stops just in front of us (a BSM car), and another pulls up behind. So we can’t do our manoeuvre until they’ve finished.

A couple of days later in a different area I was with another pupil and we stopped to do the Corner Left Reverse exercise. We’d reversed around it (not particularly well – the pupil is new to it) and when we drove back round to try again there was a learner car there trying to use the same corner. I was annoyed this time and flashed my lights – he drove off.

A couple of weeks ago a pupil had just reversed around a corner. We were going to drive off anyway after having done it correctly, but I was annoyed to see when we went back round that corner another learner was waiting to use it. I made it clear to the instructor as we passed that I wasn’t impressed.

Then tonight I was with a new pupil. She’s never done Turn In The Road before, so I stopped in a quiet place – this is at 8.15pm in a cul-de-sac, so it was quiet – and did the briefing. I noticed a little further behind us (beyond a side road junction) a car had stopped but seeing as it was stationary we went ahead, with me controlling the pedals so the pupil could work out where the kerb was. As soon as we turned round, and I’d reversed us back into a good position to try again, this idiot… no, ‘idiot’ isn’t good enough… this complete pillock from Cloud City Driving School pulled forward, blocked us in, and then proceeded to do the manoeuvre himself. It took him ages because his pupil wasn’t very good at it (not the pupil’s fault – it was his instructor behaving like a complete arse).

What really pisses me off is that if I see another learner car anywhere near where I want to do a manoeuvre then I get my pupil to drive on and we find somewhere else. If nothing else, it keeps the locals happy (they hate learners with a vengeance) by not having queues of learners in their streets. But it is common decency on the part of the instructor to think of others.

I reckon this one will be a running theme.

It’s hard to believe they get paid for what they do, those Met Office weathermen and women.

On Sunday, the forecast for Wednesday/Thursday this week indicated a low temperature of  minus 6ºC and a high of 0ºC. Admittedly, they adjusted it on Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday – but even now they say today will have a high of 4ºC and a low of 0ºC. When I went out this morning it was 6ºC and it felt rather mild.

The other thing was the snow. According to the forecast on the BBC as recently as last night we were destined to get more snow across the UK in a few hours this morning than the Alps gets in a whole season. Well, they were close: it rained a bit.

Fair enough, some places did get snow. But it was slushy, wet snow and even the places ‘hardest hit’ (according to the BBC, which is treating it typically as a disaster rivalling the Asian Tsunami) could only show a few centimetres of it. You can always tell: cut to usual shots of violent little psychopaths – sorry, lovable kids – building dirty-looking snowmen with bits of grass and mud covering them, and sliding down grassy slopes with a few patches of a grey, sleety covering on sledges.

The best bit was a couple of old guys the BBC interviewed in North Yorkshire. One was a haulier:

“Well, me and my son can’t get to work so we’re losing money!”

Yes, when you’re snowed in that’s what happens. Except you weren’t – you just decided that a few centimetres of slush was a calamity of Biblical proportions and didn’t even try. The other was a retired chap:

“Well, I can never remember it being as bad as this!”

I’d see a doctor about that memory problem, if I were you. North Yorkshire gets worse weather than this almost every year, and even I can remember numerous occasions when it was much worse, even here in the East Midlands. It was a couple of centimetres of slushy snow, for heaven’s sake, and it’ll be gone by tomorrow.

Even schools were closed. I mean, in North Yorkshire!? It used to snow more than this every year when I was a kid, and nothing could cause schools to close (or shut early) except for very thick fog – that meant we went home at 3pm instead of 4pm to avoid the traffic (they used a building as the gauge: if you couldn’t see it from across the playground then the fog was thick enough for an early close).

Cut to overhead shot of the ‘disaster area’ – fields with a lot of brown visible, and roads with clearly defined slush tracks where the traffic has freely navigated them for much of the day.

Just look at some of the pictures here. From what I can see, the only problem is that people are idiots.

If you ask a pupil what causes a skid you’ll get a range of answers. The weather. The road. The tyres. They rarely get the answer right: the cause of a skid is always sitting right behind the steering wheel.

So when the BBC starts warning of Armageddon as a result of a few centimetres of sleet, it is the morons who have crashed who have created it – not the weather.

A few months ago I switched my parents’ phone from BT to Virgin so that my dad could have the Virgin TV package and cheaper calls (I pay the bill for him anyway).

What I didn’t realise was that the phone has voicemail as standard. Looking through the literature, which I had to get off the Virgin website because they didn’t tell me any of this, you’re supposed to activate it yourself – but ours turned out to be active upon installation.

Not knowing you have a voicemail facility can be quite confusing to both callers and the line users. And this is how it has turned out. Apparently, all kinds of people have been leaving messages and not getting a reply.

Anyway, I got an ultimatum tonight to sort it out.

My dad is the kind of person who, when in possession of a remote control handset with only one button on it, is quite likely to forget which button he has to press. Therefore, the chances of him being able to access voicemail and do the necessary maintenance on his inbox are roughly the same as those of winning the Lottery.

So I’ve had it disabled.

I was on a lesson this morning with a pupil. Chinese girl, but she has a problem staying focused on things. Once her mind flips on to a different subject the one she was on previously is forgotten about. A good example would be coming up to a junction with traffic lights on red. If, say, an ambulance went through she’d forget the lights were on red as her mind would now be on the ambulance. Same thing happens if she makes a mistake – she’ll be driving perfectly then, for one reason or another, stall, veer towards/away from the kerb, etc., and she’ll be dwelling on that instead of what she should be doing next, so it all snowballs.

Well, we were doing the emergency stop. I raised my hand and said ‘STOP’ and she did it perfectly. All she needed to do now was put the handbrake on, slip it into neutral, then check her mirrors.

So what does she do? For some reason she just about climbed down into the floorwell to look at her feet. The fact we were doing the Emergency Stop exercise was completely forgotten. She even went back in for another look when I said ‘Hey, what are you doing?’

After I pulled her over – and it took what felt like 10 minutes to get moving again because she’d lost the thread completely – I managed to get her to explain: ‘I thought I’d broken my shoe’.

Well, I went to see Primal Scream last night – and this is what good rock and roll is all about! Great gig.

For such a small venue (Nottingham’s Rock City) they had a pretty substantial set, and the sound was typical of Rock City – raw! They covered most of their well-known songs (Country Girl was right at the end), but I don’t think there was one bad song in there all night. We stood near the stage-left speaker stack (I told my mate it was a bad idea, but he reckoned the sound would be worse in the middle). I think my ears were bleeding afterwards. Admittedly it was my idea to get near the stage, but I blame him for not wanting to get in the middle.

I didn’t take my camera, and the pictures I got using my mobile are absolutely crap. They made great use of strobes, and this didn’t help on the pix front, but it is a shame as this is one gig I’ll remember. Must take that damned camera next time: I keep getting the latest top-megapixel cameras then never use them.

Went for a curry afterwards and it was almost as rubbish as the one we had after the MGMT gig a few weeks ago. One of the people I was with tasted hers and immediately said ‘it tastes like soup’ – I was about to say the same thing! And the naan breads were the size of CDs (cost £2.50 each).We weren’t stupid enough to go to the same restaurant as before, but it definitely looks like Nottingham’s curry houses are using tinned soup these days and calling it ‘curry’. Oh, and they seem to have stopped using anything even resembling curry spices. Tasteless gunk!

Today started off badly. I’d arranged to pick up a pupil who lives the other side of the city. Her test was booked for 11.11, pick-up time was 09.00, and I had set my alarm for 07.30.

I woke with a start and looked at the clock to see 10.00! I quickly phoned my pupil and explained I’d overslept and missed my alarm, and that I was on my way. I felt terrible: it’s the first time I have ever done this.

I was out of the house by 10.10 and arrived at her house around 10.30. We got to the test centre 3 minutes late, and we’d had no chance to practice any of the manoeuvres as originally intended. She was out for nearly 50 minutes (that’s at the high end of the time range it takes for a test).

But she passed! Well done CP, that now makes it 8 passes in a row for me in this current run.

I had a day off today, and travelled down to Wiltshire to do a bit of shopping. Both going down, and coming back, there was one thing about many other drivers that was driving me nuts.

Why is it that – when on motorways or fast roads – other drivers feel the need to creep past you and then cut in just in front and slow down?

I lost count of the times it happened. In one particular case I was driving on the M69 doing a steady 70mph. In my mirror I could see this car in the distance and over a period of maybe 20 minutes it was either a constant distance behind or gaining on me very slowly. I was moving between the left and middle lanes as other traffic dictated, which is why I noticed him – and the M69 is a fairly quiet motorway whenever I’m on it. Eventually – and after having not moved from the middle lane at any point during his lengthy gain on me, even though he could have – he moved past, going a few miles per hour over the limit, and pulled in in front of me so that the gap was maybe a quarter of what it should have been at the speed we were travelling at, and slowed down! Behind me it was completely clear.

My only option for safety reasons was to slow down or move out.

How do they ever manage to pass their tests? Some of them shouldn’t be allowed to breed, let alone go out unsupervised in a car.