A reminder from DVSA that there are now less than 50 days before learners are going to be allowed on motorways when accompanied by a fully-qualified ADI. That means no PDIs and no mum, dad, or best mate Kyle/Kylie.
I hope to God no ADI goes out there and screws it up for everyone else – allowing learners on motorways is decades overdue.
I wrote a few days ago about the Alford Road car park in West Bridgford, and kids climbing on the roof of the sports building. Well, take a look at these two mugshots. 
I went in there again yesterday afternoon with a pupil. Just as we entered, the smug-looking retard on the left (who looks like Damien in the first two Omen films) deliberately rode his bike into our path and started trying to block us. That image is as he turned around to look at us. The one on the right was clearly aware of what he was up to judging from the sickly gawp on his face as we drove by.
I don’t think they realised how close they came to losing their teeth considering the pupil I was teaching. Before I could stop her, she’d started pumping the horn, and she was furious.
Still, I hope mummy and daddy are aware of what vicious little prats they have brought up. After all, it’s mummy and daddy who are to blame.
Or, how to destroy the environment and get paid loads of money for doing it.
This BBC news article reports on campaigners’ claims that the Lake District National Park Authority (LDNPA) has “violated [the park’s] World Heritage status”.
They cite the dramatic increase in “off-roaders” on motorbikes and 4x4s, who have damaged the landscape. The LDNPA actually encourages morons to come and tear up the countryside.
Let’s not play games here. Absolutely no 4×4 or quadbike/motorbike rider who goes to the Lake District to ride “off-road” – not a single one of them – gives a flying f*ck about the environment other than how they can turn it into mud every weekend. If they did, they wouldn’t have a 4×4 in the first place, and as for motorbike/quadbike riders… well, there’s more processing power in a mosquito’s genitalia than there is in the typical biker’s head area, and all they want to do is make a noise and send mud flying in the air.
That’s why the comments of Mark Eccles, the alleged leader of LDNPA, are laughable:
We encourage users to behave responsibly on what can be vulnerable tracks to minimise environmental impact and respect other users.
This idiot WANTS off-roaders to come to the Lake District and to “behave responsibly. There’s more chance of a squirrel becoming Pope.
He then says something which is almost the exact opposite:
[It would be] preferable if people did not take vehicles on these routes” [but it is legal].
If he had any balls, he’d stop them or deter them. It would be easy to justify simply on the basis of how much damage they cause. But he is no doubt one of that modern breed of men who have artificially balanced hormones, and for whom “equal opportunities” is the mantra that governs every decision they make. He’s no doubt of a mind that trees have to be cut down to make every corner of the Lake District accessible by wheelchair, and is probably considering painting it pink to try to attract more female visitors. So, in this case, he mustn’t discriminate against monkeys who like things that make a noise and go fast.
For anyone who doesn’t know, The Lake District National Park covers almost 1,000 square miles. And it looks like the photo above when there are no off-roaders around. Once they’ve been and gone, though, it looks like this.
I was in the Alford Road Park car park in West Bridgford last night doing a bay park with a pupil. It was empty when we arrived, but after about ten minutes some kids arrived with a football. I won’t dwell on the fact that there are signs posted on the wall of the changing rooms building which clearly say “No ball games in the car park”. Inevitably, the ball ended up being kicked on to the roof so it rolled back down a few times.
After a few more minutes, someone appeared on the roof of the building. He was wearing a black jacket but with a grey hoodie underneath.
He jumped up and down a few times, moved up and down, threw a small branch he found on the roof into the car park, then disappeared back over the other side. A few minutes later he ran back up, jumped around some more, flailing his arms, then disappeared again. He was obviously showing off to someone on the other side.
After some more minutes, during which time I had called 199 to report the incident, a group of kids came from behind the building – two females, and two males, one of the males wearing a black jacket and grey hoodie. They obviously knew the two with the ball, and the kid with the hoodie seemed to be on something (or suffering from something), since he couldn’t stand still and quickly got into a rough-and-tumble with one of the others the group joined.
Just as we left, the police turned up. Ten minutes later, they gave me a courtesy call to tell me what had happened.
Summary: “No, Mr Policeman, WE haven’t been climbing on the roof.”
Yes you were, you lying little pricks. The dashcam never lies.
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Following on from recent events in South Africa, it is understood that the Australian Cricket Team has cancelled orders for specialised Test Match equipment, shown above, it was due to take delivery of.
Finding an absolutely definitive answer to this isn’t easy. In fact, I’ve found it impossible. However, by piecing various things together, it is possible to come up with a plausible explanation.
It seems that it began in the 1930s, in America. At that time, fuel cost as little as 10 cents per gallon, and considering that cars were quite hungry back then, garages realised that by offering fuel at even a tenth of a cent less than a competitor they were likely to draw in more business. That tenth of a cent represented a significant percentage of the price per gallon back then, so the consumer also benefitted significantly.
You have to realise that garages buy in fuel in huge quantities, and it isn’t priced or taxed in round figures. Also, the profit each garage makes from every gallon (or litre) of fuel it sells these days is very small. In the UK, if fuel was advertised at £1 per litre on a forecourt, the garage in question would only make about 2p profit. The remaining 98p pays for duty, VAT, production and transport, and the overheads of the garage.
So, in 1930s America, garages started showing forecourt prices in fractions of a cent to attract business. I’m fairly certain that even back then, if a price was shown on the board as 10⁹/₁₀ cents (they used fractions and not decimals), there would have been people who religiously worked out how much fuel to put in their cars to avoid the inevitable rounding needed when it came to paying. After all, you can’t actually pay 10⁹/₁₀ cents and realise the cost benefit compared to a competitor, but buy 10 gallons and you have a nice round $1.09 and the full discount.
As time passed, the cost of fuel rose. The benefit to the consumer of pricing in fractions became less, but to the people involved in the supply it was still relevant because the tax on fuel ran to three decimal places, and average prices in any given state to four or more when trying to compare individual garage prices. The car owner might be filling up with a measly 10 gallons, but garages and refiners were dealing with thousands and millions of gallons, and the extra decimal places. But this is where marketing took over.
It is well known that the average buyer will see a £4.99 price tag on something in a different light to one which says £5. In a very fuzzy way, one of them is a whole pound cheaper unless the casual buyer stops to think about it. Well, this works with fuel prices, too. A forecourt price of £118.9p is seen as £118p.
In 50s America and later, as prices rose, the marketing benefit of retaining fractional prices took over, and it has been that way ever since (except perhaps for the adoption of decimals instead of straight fractions).
The UK has always charged in fractions, though the £-s-d monetary system did have ½d and ¼d denominations, which meant actually paying the fractional prices was possible. However, even immediately after decimalisation in 1971, non-denominational fractional prices were used. The picture above is the price list on a London forecourt in 1976 (the days of leaded and unleaded petrol), and it clearly shows fractions of 0.1p, 0.5p, and 0.8p being used – only the 0.5p could have actually been tendered, since there was a ½p coin at the time. It’s also interesting to note that garage prices didn’t start being overtly advertised until about the 70s. Up until then, the price was set on the pump dials, and the picture above shows how crude the system was even in 1976 – a time when the price of oil rose from $3 a barrel in 1973 to $12 in 1974 (a result of the 1973 Oil Crisis). Marketing thus became very significant from the 70s onwards, and now every garage has illuminated signs showing the price.
People often argue that the practice of showing prices to a tenth of a penny is some sort of scam. In reality, at its worst it is simply a marketing ploy, and no different to advertising things at £4.99 instead of £5. I mean, when you buy something at either £4.99 or £5, are you actually getting five pounds-worth of value? The answer is only “yes” if you are buying at cost price, because as soon as someone adds value (by processing it) or their profit margin it becomes a question of “how long is a piece of string?” Fuel has value and profit margins added at multiple stages, and I doubt that anyone in the UK knows what the true day-to-day cost price of a litre of fuel should be based on the unrefined crude oil price. In other words, 0.9p (or 0.7p or 0.5p) tacked on the end of something with a price that fluctuates sometimes daily by 1p or 2p (sometimes more) has no objective financial meaning to either the consumer or anyone else involved in the supply chain.
If fuel is advertised at 118.9p per litre, it doesn’t matter if you see it as 118p or 119p, you’ll still be charged at 118.9p equivalent. If another garage is advertising it at 117.9p, then it is 1p cheaper – whether you’re suckered in by the marketing people or not. Only the price difference between garages (or the price change at a single garage) really matters to the consumer.
Another way of looking at it is what that 0.9p actually means. In my car, if I fill up from empty a difference of 0.9p on each litre would equate to about 40p at current prices. However, as I have mentioned before, pumps have to be accurate to between -0.5% and +1%, and that means that I can quite legally be supplied with up to 30p worth less fuel or 55p worth more.
And the bottom line is that even if the tinfoil hat brigade got its way, 118.9p would become 119p – not 118p – and that would mean paying 5p more on a full tank.
I’ve noticed a serious downward trend in spelling and grammar these days on usually reputable websites. Even the BBC isn’t averse to mistakes.
This screenshot from an MSN newsfeed aggregate made me smile, though. It’s apparently a picture of a red panda sitting on a branch in New York.
I have visions of someone submitting this for their school homework.
Before Christmas I wrote about the most annoying ad in the world (at the moment) – the TUI ad, which is still on Sky One every ten bloody minutes.
It’s so annoying that I would never book a holiday with TUI, just on principle, and I switch the sound off or change channels as soon as it comes on. Of course, in the future – around 2030 or so – I might feel differently about booking a holiday through them, though right now they have no chance. But after all is said and done, it is just… annoying. Really, really annoying. But still just annoying.
However, some people are nutcases. Especially if they are Cornish, it would seem.
The BBC has this story about a Mother’s Day advert produced by the National Trust for “cream teas”. For anyone who doesn’t know, a cream tea is a peculiarly British thing, defined as:
…a meal taken in the afternoon consisting of tea to drink with scones, jam, and cream
This definition doesn’t do it justice, though. It is a ritual, and is only a proper cream tea if the tea is served in annoyingly small china teacups and – I wouldn’t be surprised to learn – stirred using spoons with a strict length and chemical composition. The reason I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that is that it seems the order in which the jam and cream (clotted cream, actually) are placed on the scone is also rigidly defined. At least in the minds of the aforementioned nutcases.
The picture at the top of this post is what has called all the fuss. Although I have never stooped so low as to have a cream tea because of the “ritualness” of it, it does look rather appetising. The picture below – a proper cream tea, allegedly – doesn’t.
And yet National Trust members (the secret wing of the Brexit campaign, I suspect, if you go on age) are threatening to cancel their memberships as a result of the ad. Some reckon it “makes them feel sick”. All it is is a bloody cake with jam and cream, and the order doesn’t make it taste any different anymore than a ham salad sandwich tastes different if you put the lettuce and tomatoes on in reverse order.
The Trust’s Visitor Experience manager is playing with fire when he makes light of the situation – some of those morons are serious.
Another ad (well, series of ads) which is shining a light on the average IQ of the typical Briton is the Nationwide one, featuring Flo and Joan.
Flo and Joan – played by Nicola and Rosie Dempsey – sing typical advert songs in front of a home keyboard. I suppose I should be annoyed by this one, too, but for some reason I can’t put my finger on I’m not. I’ve not listened to the words, and I’m neither driven towards or away from opening an account with Nationwide. But there’s just something about Flo and Joan that is… OK.
That’s not true for the nutcases, though. People have issued death threats to Nicola and Rosie, and these are deemed serious enough to have involved the police. Looking at some of the samples, it’s hard to believe they are deadly serious, but they overstep the mark enough to make you wonder.
Disliking something – even being intensely annoyed about it – is one thing. But to go so far as to cancel membership of an organisation which does good work or to issue threats of violence over something so trivial just doesn’t make sense.
Periodically, I will get a pupil who is desperate to pass their driving test as soon as possible.
When this happens, I explain to the pupil that since the typical new learner in the UK takes an average of around 46 hours to learn to drive, learning quickly is pretty much going to involve getting those 46 hours in in a short period of time. I strongly emphasise that this is an average, and although some people might be able to do it in fewer hours, equally there will be some who require more. I also emphasise that it isn’t a target – if they can do it quicker, great; if they can’t, they’ve got to accept it.
My quickest ever learner – starting from no experience at all – passed his test first time after only 14½ hours of lessons. I’ve had others pass first time after between 17 and 25 hours lessons. Some of these have access to private practice, and some don’t. My own pupils’ overall average number of lessons taken before passing is between 30-40 hours.
At the other end of the scale, my slowest ever learner took 160 hours, and passed on his third attempt. I know of one lady who took over 200 hours and passed on her 7th attempt (100 of those hours were with me before I finally persuaded her to switch to automatic lessons). And I’ve had a few others who have ended up taking 60 or 70 hours before finally passing.
I currently don’t do full-on (as in more than 2 hours of driving a day) intensive courses. The one time I tried, it turned out that the pupil was well into the slow side of the curve, and two intensive courses of 20 hours spaced over a week each time resulted in two comprehensive test fails. My own version of an “intensive” course is a 30-hour paid-upfront package and no more than 2 hours of driving per day. I don’t advertise it, and I only mention it after a positive initial assessment lesson (there’s no way I’m going to offer it to someone who might struggle). As I said above, people have to accept that they might not learn as quickly as they’d hoped.
Recently, I have noticed a renewed interest in intensive lessons. Some people need a licence in order to improve their employment prospects or job security, some want to pass before they go off to university, while others are in the process of converting a full licence from overseas to a UK one. People with previous driving experience are likely to need fewer lessons, and a more intensive style can often suit them.
Of course, I only cover Nottinghamshire, and I am only one of hundreds of driving instructors in this area. So even if I don’t provide full-on intensive lessons, there are plenty of instructors who do. If you Google the topic, a company called PassMeFast crops up a lot. They cover Cheshire, North/South/East/West Yorkshire, Greater Manchester, Lancashire, and Merseyside, and they might be able to help you if you are desperate to get a licence. They seem to offer a wide range of packages.
PassMeFast offers crash courses of up to 48 hours of lessons and, looking at their website, they’re pretty sensible about timescales. The description of that 48 hour course implies that the learner could do as few as four hours of driving per week over a 12-week period. I tell my own beginners to think in terms of 3 months to reach test standard if they are taking regular lessons.
PassMeFast offers both manual and automatic tuition, and they can also help with your theory test. They can arrange for fast-track tests, which take place at the end of your course, and they schedule commencement of your lessons around the test date. Training is done local to you, and the test is at a local centre, so you won’t have to travel. And they offer an assessment lesson so you can decide which course is best for you.
It is also encouraging that in their terms and conditions they make it clear that they won’t allow people to go to test if their driving standards are deemed unsatisfactory by their instructor. PassMeFast does not employ instructors – they simply act as agents between enlisted instructors and pupils seeking lessons. However, they do arbitrate where necessary. And they quite rightly state that they cannot guarantee that you will pass your tests.
Looking at some of the customer reviews on their website, they obviously have a lot of satisfied customers – and they are real ones, as they all have Facebook profiles.
So, if you’re looking to pass your test quickly, and you think that an intensive course might be the way to go, if you’re in an area covered by PassMeFast it can’t hurt to give them a call.