This is the kind of thing you have to deal with when you’re driving on Britain’s roads these days. Complete wankers like the driver of this white Mercedes, registration number KL68 TLY.
This was on a 50mph road, with me driving (at 50mph), and there was no one behind me.
If Nottinghamshire Police had managed to at least drag themselves into the latter part of the 20th century, I’d be able to upload this for them to deal with. But no. The only way of even informing them of it is to send my memory card in its entirety, with zero chance of getting it back, and even less chance of them following up on the situation anyway. And that’s coming from someone who has a lot of respect for the police.
My love affair with mango lassi started some years ago, after I’d been to a concert in Leeds. I was driving my mate home, and we decided to stop off for a curry.
Now, usually when we go for a curry, we end up drinking large quantities of beer (when he comes to Nottingham, I get a taxi and he stops over). But I don’t drink when I’m driving, which I do when I go to Leeds, and in any case many of the restaurants in Leeds are not licensed. The one we chose at random (mainly because it was there, and open), wasn’t. So I ordered a mango lassi, which was served in a large jug. And it was bloody gorgeous.
As is my wont, I then decided I would make it at home. It’s actually very easy, and there’s no secret or technique. All you do is pour a 450g pot of plain yoghurt into a liquidiser, about the same amount of mango, about half that amount of milk, a tablespoon or so of honey, and a handful of ice cubes, then blitz it.
The only real issue in the UK is the mangoes. The ones you buy year round at the supermarket are mainly the green-red ones – I think they’re called “Alice” mangoes – and they’re usually not ripe so as to extend their shelf life. You can speed up the ripening by putting them in a paper bag with a banana, but that’s a pain in the arse because it can take a while. They still make a decent lassi, though. Alternatively, if you have a good local Indian or Pakistani supermarket, they usually have seasonal mangoes in stock, and they’re a darned sight cheaper than supermarket ones. The drawback here is in the word “seasonal” – decent mango varieties are only in season for a few months each year.
Recently, one of the online stores I buy stuff from sent out an email announcing that the new season’s mango harvest was in. So I duly ordered a couple of cases. I chose the best mango variety there is – the Alphonso.
The Alphonso is a smallish mango (compared to the Alice variety), with a yellow skin. When it is ripe, you can massage it carefully, which breaks up the flesh inside, then break off the stalk and suck the liquidised flesh out, which is apparently how they’re often eaten. The same technique makes extracting the pulp quite straightforward – you just squeeze it into a bowl and that’s it. Well, almost. Mangoes have a bloody big stone (seed, or pit) inside, and those stones are noted for the fact that it is almost impossible to hold one since they’re so slippery. The main issue for me is that some (quite a lot, actually) of the flesh is still attached to them, and you don’t want to waste it.
So anyway, after a lot of swearing as I tried to get all that extra pulp off the first two stones, I decided there must be a better way – especially since I had a couple of dozen to get through. I thought about it for a bit, then surmised that some sort of gentle friction would clean the stones of pulp, so I turned to my trusty Kenwood Chef. I put all the pulpy stones in the bowl, fitted the dough hook (I said dough hook – keep reading), and left it running on slow speed for about 30 minutes. It worked like a charm, and got all the pulp off.
Whatever you do, don’t use the K-blade. I’ve already tried that for you – you’re welcome, though you probably don’t realise it. I thought it would be quicker. However, whereas the dough hook doesn’t get anywhere near the sides of the bowl, the K-blade does, and due to the aforementioned slipperiness of the pulp-coated stones, if (or, when) one gets trapped between the bowl wall and the K-blade with a powerful motor behind it… well, let’s just say that it is messy, involves at least two T-shirts, and you don’t really want to go there. As I said, you’re welcome. The dough hook, though, just keeps hitting the stones and doesn’t trap them, and if you leave it long enough this removes all of the pulp.
I was planning to freeze the pulp in portions, but I don’t think it will last long enough to make that worthwhile now I’m on a lassi roll.
My ADI badge was due for renewal in October 2018. I got the initial alert that my DBS check (formerly the CRB check) needed to be renewed in early April – 6 months before my badge expired. This alert came from DVSA via email.
I applied for my DBS immediately online. DVSA supplies you with a PIN number and a secret word. You apply via an online form.
Once you have completed your DBS application, you take a printout of the completed form along with the necessary documents to a Post Office branch that does identity/document checks (you can find a branch at GOV.UK). Note that your local Post Office will almost certainly not have this facility – you will need to go to one likely to be situated in the middle of a large city, with no easy parking, and with queues of people with prams and other annoying things, doing what people who use Post Office branches in the first place usually do. In other words, be prepared for a long wait.
Be careful with your initial DBS application. I am paperless, so had to go to my bank separately to get an official bank statement printed out as one of my check documents. You have to physically put the date of the statement on your application form – even though it is clearly printed on the actual statement. The problem is that you can only use a date in the past, so get the statement first, then fill the form in the next day. Trust me: if the statement date is today or in the future, the online system won’t let you proceed, and if you try to post date it, the Post Office will reject it because the dates won’t match.
When I did mine in October last year, I used my driving licence as a check document (and you probably will be, too). At that time, the date you had to physically enter on the form was the date you passed your test. It was NOT, as you might reasonably expect (as I did), the “valid from” date on the front of your licence (i.e. when you last did your photo update). It was totally f—ing stupid, but that’s how it is, and it isn’t explained anywhere that I could find (nor was it such an issue any of the previous times I had a CRB/DBS check done). The woman at the Post Office told me it catches a lot of other people out , too. Basically, if you don’t remember the exact date you passed your test (and I bloody well didn’t), you have to infer the date from the list of entitlements on the back of it.
As an update to the date on your licence thing, a reader emailed me recently (May 2019) and told me that he had used his pass date, as I outlined above, and the idiots had rejected it and wanted his “valid from” date from the front of the licence. He tells me he was shown the document dated January 2019, so it seems the morons have moved the goalposts and not told anyone. Just be aware of this if yours is due – it looks like the required date is now the one on the front of the licence, which it definitely wasn’t when I did it (though it should have been)!
It’s a stupid system, because the dates on bank statements and driving licences are integral to those documents, and all you are effectively being checked on is whether they caught you out when asking you to write them down on a separate form. It’s even more stupid when you get it wrong, and the Post Office worker shows you how to fill it in properly with the correct figures, so you go away (you have to generate another form) and make the corrections. There is no security aspect to it whatsoever.
I used my passport, my driving licence, and a bank statement as my check documents. I had recently had to apply for a new passport and used this instead of my birth certificate (which has to be an original, and not a copy like mine is).
My DBS certificate came through about seven days after the document check was completed (the check at the Post Office triggers your application process). It costs £6.00 for the service.
Now we come to the actual renewal of your Green Badge. There is no warning later in the year from DVSA – it’s up to you to keep track of your application.
Every Green Badge expires on the last day of whatever month you originally registered in. You apply to renew as soon as possible in the month in question. In my case, with my badge expiring on 31 October, I had to apply any time from 1 October (I would not have been allowed to do it on 30 September).
You simply log into the IRDT system – which every instructor should have access to – and make your application. You will need to provide the number on your DBS certificate, which DVSA will have a copy of/access to. You need a means to make payment (credit or debit card). It costs £300. I applied for mine on 1 October, and it was issued and is now current since 2 October. It arrived in the post 5 October, and has an expiry date of 31 October 2022. All set for another 4 years, now.
To summarise. Assuming you have a credit or debit card, and are not still holding out against technology and the internet, the times taken to actually get both the DBS and your new badge are very short. The documentation and chasing around required for the DBS application is a right pain in the arse, so plan ahead. Application for the Green Badge is simple.
On the other hand, if you insist on using paper money or cheques, won’t use the internet, or want to kick up a stink about which photo you want on your badge… good luck with that. I have no idea what to do in those circumstances.
I wrote this article way back in 2012. At the time, DVSA had just launched a new facility where you could find your Theory Test Certificate (TTC) number online if you’d lost the paper sheet. Here’s the link to the feature on GOV.UK.
You need the number if you’re going to book your practical test – and note that I said the number, not the certificate itself.
A lot of pupils get worried that they need to take the actual TTC to their practical test, though. By that time, many will have lost or misplaced it (quite a few of mine have, and we usually only find out the night before or on the day, which allows me to wind them up a little). Indeed, the booking confirmation you get when you book your practical says you should take your licence and TTC along with you.
In all the years I have been an instructor, I can think of only one or two occasions where the examiner has asked to see it – and those were at least ten years ago. More recently, when a pupil has offered the TTC along with their licence, the examiner isn’t interested. They only want to see the licence.
If you think about it, you wouldn’t be able to book your practical if you hadn’t passed the theory, so it’s obvious you have done when you turn up on test day.
When any of my pupils starts to fret over not being able to find their TTC – and after I’m finished winding them up – I tell them the examiner won’t ask for it, and even if he or she does, just say that you didn’t get one or that the printer at the testing station was broken when you were there. None of them have ever had to do that, though, because the examiners simply don’t ask for it.
If you still have your TTC, take it along with you by all means. But don’t worry if you’ve lost it, because unless there is some problem with your booking, I cannot see any reason why they would demand to see it.
I can’t find any specific information to back this up, but a little bird told me that Bill Plant was in financial difficulties again earlier this year. And they have apparently switched from BMWs to Volkswagens. The exact words used that Bill Plant went bust again earlier this year.
The company which rescued them last time – Ecodot – was dissolved in 2014, and became Bill Plant. Companies House (CH) indicates that both Ecodot (deceased) and Bill Plant have the same registered address. The last submitted balance sheet suggests that between 2017 and 2018, Bill Plant’s P&L reserves had fallen from a negative £156k to negative £563k. They opted not to provide full P&L accounts.
That was as of May 2018, and the 2019 submission isn’t due until May 2020. So they could well have technically gone bust and no one would know unless they announced it.
There’s a passage in Catch-22 where the Chaplain is musing over his misfortunes, and asks himself:
Did it then seem probable, as he had once overheard Dunbar ask, that the answers to the riddles of creation would be supplied by people too ignorant to understand the mechanics of rainfall?
I have exactly the same feeling right now, having just watched the BBC Evening News, where they interviewed some of those idiots protesting over climate change in London.
Does it really seem probable that the solution to global warming will come from a bunch of hatchet-faced, middle-aged and elderly women – the same kind who camped out on Greenham Common in the 80s – with multi-coloured dreadlocks and half a kilo of face jewellery? Is The Truth only likely to be given to people stupid enough to superglue themselves to buses, trains, and each other? Or 16-year olds who should be in school?
I don’t think so.
At the time of writing, over 950 of these imbeciles have been arrested, with 40 being charged for various offences (so far). Photographs of several of these middle-aged prats being arrested show that it is probably the most exciting thing that’s happened to them in the last 50 years. One of their number, an exotic specimen who goes under the name of Larch Maxey – and I’d not be surprised to find that that doesn’t appear on any electoral list – is quoted:
On Tuesday we’ve got a series of strategic points around the city which we will be targeting to cause maximum economic disruption while simultaneously focusing on Parliament and inviting MPs to pause.
In other words, they’re going to try and block parliament from sitting. If Maxey engaged at least two of his handful of brain cells, he might realise that the “economic disruption” he is causing is also responsible for far more pollution than usual, as cars and lorries (and public transport) sit gridlocked. Police are travelling from all over the country – using road transport – to help. High profile dipsticks are flying in (or using trains) especially so that it can be seen how committed they are to The Cause. And let’s not even consider the carbon footprint associated with all that extra superglue that’s being sold.
Extinction Rebellion needs to get it into its thick skulls that we’re not going to go back to living in caves and eating algae.
Regular readers will know that I don’t hold back on telling it like it is. I don’t give damn that the trend is towards making it a crime to tell the truth if the truth involves women or those from minority groups having done something wrong. The truth is the truth, regardless of sex or ethnic origin.
This BBC article reports that Victoria Parry, 30, was three times over the drink-drive limit when she smashed into three other cars and careered down an embankment, where her car burst into flames. She’d drunk a bottle of wine. In court, she admitted to dangerous driving – a serious offence which carries an unlimited fine and up to 14 years in prison. To make matters worse, Parry has two previous drink-drive convictions.
Now, if Parry had been a man, he would have been starting a long prison sentence right now. He’d have been fined a lot of money. And he might even have been put on the sex-offenders’ register just as a precaution.
Parry’s case was different, though. You see, both she and the Judge were women. As a result, she was not handed down a prison sentence – which would have been absolutely guaranteed if she were a man. In the Judge’s precise words:
If Miss Parry was a man, there is no question it would have been straight down the stairs, because this is a shocking case of dangerous driving against a background of two previous convictions for excess alcohol.
The BBC article makes no mention of fines or bans, either, and I can’t find any mention in reports from other sources.
Naturally, the mitigating circumstances – which also came from a woman – Parry’s lawyer, Lucy Tapper, pin the blame firmly on men. Parry is apparently an irresponsible pisshead because of being in an abusive relationship, so it’s clearly the fault of men that she has three drink-drive convictions (now) and is lucky she hasn’t killed someone. To be fair, there is no mention of who the “relationship” was with, and I might have got that particular anti-male assessment wrong. Tapper whined:
There is deep and genuine regret on her part.
You forgot to mention that that regret extends across three convictions, now, Lucy. You missed a trick to lay it on even thicker.
Parry and the Judge, Sarah Buckingham, should both be in prison. Parry for being the serial drink-driver that she is, and the Judge for utter contempt of what remains of our legal system.
The case has been referred to the judicial watchdog. Although she probably won’t be, Buckingham should be looking at applying for shelf-stacking jobs at Tesco, where she can do less harm.
Someone found the blog on the search term “what are the chances of passing your test in three months?”
The short answer: DVSA statistics show that the average UK learner takes 46 hours of lessons with an instructor, and 20 or more hours of private practice. Without getting into any arguments over that just yet, let’s assume for the purposes of this discussion that you will need 46 hours.
If you take a single one hour lesson a week, it’s going to take you 46 weeks to get to test standard. If you take two hours of lessons a week, it’ll take 23 weeks. If you take four hours of lessons a week, it’ll take you about 13 weeks. That’s around a year, six months, or three months respectively.
The longer answer: For all sorts of reasons, an individual could end up taking far fewer or many more than 46 hours to get to the required standard. That DVSA figure is an average measured from real people taking real tests. It’s not a forecast, though it can be useful as a rough pointer.
Over the years, I’ve had two pupils manage passes in well under 20 hours, many who have done it with between 20-35 hours, and several who have taken well over 60. I can recall two who took 140 hours and 160 hours, and a recent one who did 120 hours spread over more than three years. I also know one who took 100 hours in a manual car with me, then a further 100 hours or more in an automatic, before finally passing on her seventh attempt (she’s since given up driving because she crashed the car almost every time she left her driveway – three times in the first fortnight after she got it).
I explain all this to my pupils who have never driven before, and suggest they think in terms of 30 hours plus to start with, then see how things go. I also point out that if they are typical, it will probably take around 4 months if they’re doing an average of two hours of lessons a week. I explain clearly that this is not a prediction or target, but merely a guideline based on past experience, and if it turns out they can do it it 10 hours, I’ll be as happy as they are about it.
Now, 30 hours – taking two hours of lessons per week – would just about squeeze into a three month window with a bit of tweaking here and there. If it was going to take 40 hours, you can add another month to that time frame. On the other hand, if you’re in the 30 hour bracket and did three of four hours a week, passing within six weeks would be feasible.
The reality: You simply don’t know how many hours you’re going to need until you’ve taken them. However, once you start lessons you can usually get a good idea of where you are on the curve within a couple of hours. Obviously, if you have previously taken lessons – possibly even getting close to test standard – then you’ll probably already be a long way towards your goal. On the flipside of that, If you’ve only got previous experience driving overseas, you may find that you are only marginally ahead of a beginner when you start in the UK.
If you’re on the wrong side of the curve – for whatever reason – you’ll need more hours than someone who isn’t. It doesn’t mean there’s anything wrong with you – it’s just the way it is.
You can’t be a Marvel Superhero just because you want to be, so picking a preferred number of hours and expecting to pass if your learning ability points to a higher number being required isn’t going to work. I had one early last year who declared after his tenth hour that he was now test ready. I asked him if he’d always only ever planned to take just ten lessons, and he said yes. He’d never told me that, and we parted company at that point. He was nowhere near test standard, and the last I heard was that six months later his mum was still teaching him.
People in general seem to have major problems understanding averages, distributions, and how biology works. So I stress again that DVSA’s statistics show that the majority of people take about 46 hours of lessons with an instructor. It doesn’t matter that your best mate Kyle was taught by his mum, or that he told you he passed “after 8 hours”. He was almost certainly lying or very confused over that figure (I’ve had them before where they are already good drivers, but the skills were picked up in stolen cars or driving illegally, and they don’t include that in their public declarations of Superheroism). And in any case, you are not Kyle and are probably not being taught by his mum.
Just remember: the average learner in the UK takes around 46 hours and some private practice to get to test standard. Some take a lot less, and some take a lot more, thanks to Mother Nature.
For anyone who’s interested, I recently had a pupil who was driving on their full licence from another country inside the 12 month period they are allowed. They had a UK provisional licence, and were taking their test in their own car.
The question arose over what would happen if they failed their test. Would they be legally allowed to drive away?
I emailed DVLA, and they replied:
A non GB licence holder can still drive for up to 12 months regardless of a UK test failure.
Essentially, they could fail their test 20 times and still be allowed to drive alone on their non-UK licence inside that 12 months as long as the licence remained valid. I know that will get a lot of Brexiters hot under the collar, but it’s the way it is.
It is not voided when they obtain a provisional licence, which makes sense, since the intended purpose of that 12 month period is to give them time to pass a UK test.
You will remember the Leave campaign’s Brexit bus, which stated:
We send the EU £350m a week – let’s fund our NHS instead
This was enough to persuade many people of restricted intelligence to vote to leave the EU back in 2016. They genuinely believed that we really did send that amount of money and got nothing in return.
Worryingly, even as recently as October 2018, 42% of the electorate still believed this stupid claim to be true – even though it has been proven false many times over. We have never “sent” £350 million, and whatever we do “send” doesn’t take into account the rebates, grants, funding, and business contracts that EU membership brings.
Even if we did actually send £350 million a week and get absolutely nothing in return, a recent study has concluded that Brexit has cost the UK £550 million a week since the referendum! And that’s on top of the imaginary £350 million. The study also said that there had been no significant boost in exports following the collapse of the GBP. A massive boost in exports is a major tenet in the Brexiters’ unicorns and rainbows vision of the future, remember.
The damaging cost of Brexit in this study is actually the lowest figure out of several other studies into the same issue. Previously, Goldman Sachs has estimated that Brexit has cost us as much as £600 million a week, and the Bank of England put it as high as £800 million a week (both on top of the imaginary £350 million). One thing I am certain of is that studies by Goldman Sachs and the BoE are to be trusted more compared with the warped fantasies of thick prats in Wetherspoons who drive white vans.
Even taking this latest (and lowest) figure, and assuming that the £350 million was real, if Brexit finally happened tomorrow, it would take over two years before we started to be “better off” by not paying that £350 million anymore thanks to the extra it has cost us already. And even that is based on the unicorns and rainbows premise that the £350 million we won’t be sending to the EU isn’t going to be needed trying to claw back what we loose by not being EU members.
Of course, the typical level of Brexiter intelligence dismisses these figures – which are all in the same ball park, and produced by experts – and instead adopts some imaginary and undisclosed number they prefer the look of, and which equates to us somehow being better off.
My love affair with mango lassi started some years ago, after I’d been to a concert in Leeds. I was driving my mate home, and we decided to stop off for a curry.
This article is now obsolete, as it partly dates from 2010 and includes details up to 2018. 
There’s a passage in Catch-22 where the Chaplain is musing over his misfortunes, and asks himself:
Someone found the blog on the search term “what are the chances of passing your test in three months?”
You will remember the Leave campaign’s Brexit bus, which stated: