I’m a Labour voter, and in my youth I was also an active member of the Labour Party. However, I have never agreed with strikes in general, and can only ever think of a couple over the years which I believed were completely justified.
One thing I am absolutely certain of, though, is that those in the Emergency Services and the Military should never, ever strike.
However, here we are in 2022. Nurses are striking, and ambulance drivers are striking.
I’m not going to go into the political arguments over who is right and who is wrong (it’s actually both sides, albeit for different reasons). But I would point out that considering the British NHS system was once the envy of the world, yesterday government warnings went out effectively advising people to avoid having accidents today! Because there were potentially no ambulances to pick you up if you had one, and no one to treat you if you went to A&E.
The trouble, though, is the time of year. Every Christmas week it is the same – the roads are full of zombie drivers who don’t have a clue, those who have been drinking or taking drugs, boy racers showing off, irate people trying to get somewhere, and if it is icy (as it has been recently), this amplifies any issues. Between them, they end up having (or usually causing) prangs of various degrees of severity. There have been numerous incidents in the last seven days around here, and even today on my first lesson I passed a car on the side of the road which had recently been disabled judging by the state of its front end (this was on a long, straight road).
Bearing all this in mind, I was being watchful as I drove to my lesson. It was busy, and the zombies were doing their usual thing around the retail parks, which resulted in ‘normal’ drivers trying to get past them. One particular style of zombie driving that sends me nuts at any time is delaying moving off, driving slowly, switching lanes without signalling (especially on roundabouts), and driving in the ‘fast’ lane even though they want to turn left (often trying to move over far too late). Take a look at this dashcam footage from my journey.
[vplayer id=’38046′]This was at the Colwick Roundabout. I was in the right-hand lane of two for turning right. Note the grey Mini in the left-hand lane. As he moved off from the lights, he pulled across into the right-hand lane with no signal, forcing the red car to swerve to avoid him. He then proceeded to drive at 30mph in a clearly marked 40mph zone. This prompted some traffic to pass him on the left (I remained behind). He negotiated the Virgin Roundabout, braked when he saw a car pull up at the first exit, and again proceeded to drive at 30mph in a 40mph zone. There was a long tailback by this time. He swerved in shock when a Tesla passed him in the bus lane (electric vehicles are allowed to use that bus lane, though the jury is still out on whether they’re allowed to do it at the speeds they usually do). He and his passenger seemed to gesticulate wildly at this.
I passed him at the Racecourse Roundabout, but here’s the kicker. When I looked in my mirror, I saw he had an L plate on the front. You will notice from the video that there wasn’t one on the back. It was a learner driver!
I don’t think he was on his test – there is no way the examiner would have gone out without L plates (it wasn’t windy, and the speed he was driving at would have been unlikely to have caused sufficient airflow to jettison the rear L plate). There is also little chance the examiner would have allowed him to continue at 30mph for so long given the queue behind. If he was on test, he would have just picked up a dangerous fault for switching lanes, and serious faults for staying in the right hand lane for no reason (he was going far too slow to overtake anyone, and was simply holding up traffic), and for driving at 30mph when 40mph was signed, and it was clear in front of him. He was certainly heading towards the test centre, and I think he was actually going to his test.
I suspect it was a ‘private runner’ – the examiners’ favourite. This is where someone is taught by a family member, who is often not a good driver anyway, and goes to test in their own car. The last few times I’ve been at Colwick, examiners who took private runners out have walked back less than ten minutes later (they’ve terminated as it is too dangerous). A few weeks ago, two examiners walked back, several minutes apart, and a few weeks before that the examiner abandoned the test before they’d even made it to Sainsburys less than a quarter of a mile away.
If one of mine looked to be moving lanes like this one did on a lesson, and in that volume of traffic, I’d take the wheel to keep them in the correct one and then pull over somewhere to discuss it. I would also make them go faster if they were driving that slowly and then discuss that somewhere, too. And I wouldn’t let them hold traffic up by being in the wrong lane. If they weren’t capable of addressing those things, then they shouldn’t be in that sort of situation yet.
When I’m explaining the controls on their first lesson (or sometimes, just their first lesson with me, because no one has covered it with them before), when covering the gas pedal, I say:
When we’re driving, things I’ll say are ‘more gas’ (press a little more), ‘less gas’ (ease off a little), ‘off the gas’ (take your foot off the pedal completely), and my favourite ‘gas, gas, gas, gas, gas…’ (when I want you to accelerate more quickly).
The frightening part, though, is that if this Mini guy was going to his test, there is every possibility the route he got was in the opposite direction and away from those roundabouts. And then he might just have got lucky.
And by tomorrow, he could be on those roundabouts by himself, still without a clue.