Surprisingly, a commonly visited article on the blog is the one entitled How to Bribe Driving Examiners. It shows that there is obviously a market for liars and cheats.

It is therefore gratifying to see that one such liar and cheat, who goes by the name of Ali Ahmad, has been jailed for pandering to other liars and cheats. The 46-year-old of Ipswich was found guilty of sitting both theory and practical tests for two men at venues in Ipswich, Leicester, and Watnall.

Ahmad charged between £700 and £1,000 a time, and although he was prosecuted for two such offences, there is the suggestion he was ‘running a business’ and there may have been more.

There is every indication that the tests Ahmad passed – the two people in question gained full licences as a result – have been rescinded.

As I have said elsewhere, the idiots who pay people like Ahmad could probably pass by themselves for the same amount of money or less – and they’d be doing it honestly as well as actually learning to drive. The likes of Ahmad inevitably get caught sooner or later, so it is money down the drain.

This happened here in Nottingham this morning. You really do have to be a special kind of stupid to achieve it, but it is far from being the first time exactly the same thing has happened. Frankly, it wouldn’t really surprise me if some of them are repeat offenders, either.

Basically, someone drove on to a tram-only route in Lenton and managed to get a fair distance up the bridge until they were grounded on the rails and came to a stop. The image above is taken from the other side, but on the approach on the other side, this is what you see:

Now, I must be honest and say that having the tram go in a more or less straight line like that, with cars having to steer to the right, is just asking for trouble. I know that, because a disturbing number of my learners will happily drive in a straight line even if there is a brick wall in front of them until I read them the riot act after the first time they try it. The general public is barely at a higher driving standard at the best of times.

Yes, the ‘No Entry’ signs – all twelve of them – might not be quite the giveaway you’d expect, even though ‘Except trams’ is added under every one of them. The ‘TRAM ONLY’ lettering on the road could we whiter (and they could even illuminate it and have it shoot jets of flame). And the big rectangular sign stating ‘WARNING – DO NOT FOLLOW TRAMS BEYOND THIS POINT’, which was put up after the numerous previous instances of people doing just that, might still not ring any bells. And God forbid that the sudden 30cm drop, metal grids, and bits of rock instead of Tarmac 15 metres further on should alert you to some kind of issue. But clearly, none of this has any effect whatsoever on some people.

The funny thing is the number of ‘No Entry’ signs has gradually increased over time as events of this exact same nature have repeated themselves. They only put the big rectangular ‘DO NOT FOLLOW’ one up because there was no more space for ‘No Entry’ signs.

Indeed, the sad specimen in this case had managed to get over the other side of the rise on the bridge before grinding to a halt. You can only wonder where they might have ended up if they’d managed to keep moving.

The real problem was that they also caused the tram system to grind to a halt, too, while engineers removed the vehicle and checked the lines.

There really is no excuse. The driver in question ought to have their licence revoked.

Over the last couple of years, I’ve got involved with CCTV cameras. It started with my Bird Box Camera (which had some activity in the first year). But that interest quickly moved into home security and doorbell monitoring as I learned about camera networking.

When I began playing around with the security CCTV, I noticed that at night there sometimes appears to be a lot of activity judging from the motion alerts that are triggered.

Some of it is cats (it turns out we have three who prowl at night). Some of it is spiders and their webs (the webs catch the infrared light and waft in any air current. Occasionally – but still quite frequently – it is insects, particularly moths, which are attracted to the infrared lights. If a large moth approaches the camera, you sometimes see a bright white blob with appendages, and if you playback the recording you can see it fly in, move towards the lens, then fly away again. It’s this which attracts the spiders, and as a result of those, I constructed a long-reach pole with a duster on the end. During summer it is sometimes necessary to remove the webs two or three times a night. I even bought some spider repellent called Spider-EX to try and keep them away (and it seems to work).

The upshot is that I quickly realised that CCTV picks up quite a lot, and not always what you are most interested in.

I also realised that some triggers are none of the above, and that in spring, for example – when the trees are producing pollen – clouds of it will be picked up as they are blown towards the camera at night (during the day it is invisible). Initially, of course, I didn’t know that, even though I had guessed at it when I saw the triggers. And that was why, when I Googled it, even on the reputable camera websites, I was amazed to discover that the majority of people posting there were convinced it was either ghosts or UFOs (often both). And I am not making that up. Hence the title of this article.

I mention this because tonight it is foggy. Not especially thick fog, but a heavy damp mist, and enough to warrant Met Office warnings about it. And it looks like this on my CCTV (the video at the top, which is in HD reduced from the 4K my cameras operate at). It looks like heavy snowfall, yet it is dry outside apart from the dampness.

For anyone who is interested, my cameras are all hardwired. I started with Wi-fi cameras in my bird box, but the distance between the camera and my router meant I got a weak and unreliable signal. I then installed a Wi-fi access point, which worked much better. I was able to get a very strong Wi-fi signal at the far end of our fairly large garden, and the birdbox camera could easily pick it up. But then, the bird in my box broke the aerial off the camera while hunting for bugs inside above the camera! Not wanting to have to keep repairing the camera, that was when I went with hardwiring.

I have a single cable from my computer room/router which I have run to the garage and two PoE switches. PoE is ‘power over ethernet’, and it means you can power a camera and network it with a single Ethernet cable. One switch daisy chains to a third in the shed. Doing it this way means I just need to have one hole in the brick cavity wall of the house, and I can route all the cameras to the garage or shed depending on where they are located. It allows for shorter cable runs, and drilling holes through wood is much easier than through brick, especially if the cables have Ethernet connectors on them. Wiring up your own Ethernet connectors to bare cable is something I discovered you don’t want to have to do too often if it can be avoided, and it is only marginally less troublesome than drilling a 16mm hole through brick to fit an already terminated cable through.

Quite a few years ago now – God! It was in 2009 – there was a case where a foul little chav was prosecuted for deliberately blocking an ambulance while it was engaged in an emergency call.

Although it is hard to fathom what must have been going on inside her tiny little mind, in that particular case the ambulance staff were trying to resuscitate a patient in the back, who subsequently died. That nasty little piece of work (and her boyfriend) was very lucky she was not held responsible for that death, and consequently got away with a suspended prison sentence and a driving ban.

I’d noticed a spike in traffic to that particular article over the last few days, which I now realise was due to another instance of someone purposely blocking an ambulance while it was on a blue-light call.

In this case, some similarly backward individual to the one back in 2009, who goes by the human name of Albert Butler, repeatedly blocked its progress. As you can see from the official police video, he was sentenced to 8 months in prison (suspended for 18 months), given unpaid work, and banned from driving for three years.

The ‘man’ is a headcase. He ought to be behind bars for what he did.

I wrote this in 2019 and updated it in March 2022 (after a reader sent me a link to a Home Office internal document or SOP). I’ve just added a late 2022 update.

When I first published this in 2019, ADIs were not on the list of accepted professions for signing passport applications. I contacted the Passport Office and their precise words were:

…a driving instructor can be considered a suitable countersignature not because they are a driving instructor, but if they would be considered the owner/manager of a limited or VAT registered company.

If they would not be registered in this way we cannot guarantee they would be accepted by the processing team.

Driving instructors could not countersign passport applications according to the Passport Office. Anyone getting away with it could easily not have, since ADIs were not officially acceptable as counter signatories.

Even right now, as of this update, the GOV.UK website lists the recognised professions, and driving instructors are not on it, which means that what the Passport Office told me is still the correct explanation. Also note that the counter signatory has to have known the applicant for at least two years, but more on that later.

Early in 2022, a reader sent me a link to what appears to be an internal SOP for Home Office staff dating from June 2021. On this, ADIs are mentioned. At the time, the document referred to the ‘outward-facing acceptance list’. In other words, the same link as given above – the GOV.UK website list of recognised professions, which ADIs are not on.

The Home Office SOP clearly indicates that it is for internal use by its staff, so it would seem that certainly in early 2022, acceptance of the counter signatory is discretionary, and ADIs apparently have a bit of a positive bias applied to them when this discretion is being exercised by the Passport Office. However, they are still not on the official outward-facing acceptance list.

In a further update to this article, in late 2022, I looked at the SOP again and it no longer uses the term ‘outward-facing acceptance list’. Oddly, the issue date and version number are unchanged, but that phrase is no longer in the document. On pages 9 and 10, it lists the recognised professions and ADIs are on it. But I stress this SOP is still only an internal Home Office document and cannot be used by outsiders in any legitimate way.

As I pointed out earlier in 2022, due to its size and scope, the SOP looks like it (or the guidelines in it) have been around in some form or another for considerably longer than the 2021 publication date suggests. This would likely explain why I – along with others – have gotten away with countersigning passport applications in the past.

The bottom line is that ADIs are still not on the public list of accepted professions at GOV.UK. But due to the obvious change to that SOP during 2022, I am keeping my eyes on it.

The Passport Office can use its own discretion if the counter signatory is an ADI. It can also apply discretion if the counter signatory has known the applicant for less than two years. But this is another potential pitfall: the vast majority of ADIs have not known their pupils for anywhere near two years, so it they are countersigning for them they are really pushing their luck.

Technically, driving instructors cannot officially sign off passport applications according to the public list of recognised professions. The internal SOP indicates they might be accepted if they do, since they are mentioned on the internal discretionary list.

I sign them and no one says anything

Officially, you are not authorised to sign passport applications. It would appear the Passport Office is applying its discretion.

No one has ever questioned it

If they did, your signature could be rejected. The Passport Office is applying its discretion – which it won’t apply to everyone in the same way.

ADIs are “teachers”

No we are not. A teacher is someone who is a member of the teaching profession, and who specifically does that job day in, day out in a school or college. A driving instructor is absolutely not classified as a teacher in the professional and official sense the word is meant. Like it or not, a driving instructor is not one of the official recognised professions.

So is it illegal to sign them?

No – but it’d be bloody interesting to see what happened if someone you’ve only known for a couple of weeks, and whose passport was obtained with your endorsement, suddenly turned up on the FBI’s Most Wanted list, and they wanted to know how he or she got it. But it isn’t illegal to sign them off. You’re just not officially authorised to do so – but the Passport Office uses its own discretion to decide whether to accept you.

But I’ve been contacted previously to verify that I signed

That’s the Passport Office applying its discretion. If you read the SOP I linked to in the article, you can see that they have to chase the countersignatory in some cases to verify their identity and their knowledge of the applicant. In all honesty, being contacted is closer to not being accepted than you realise – they wouldn’t be checking otherwise.

The Passport Office told me I could sign as an ADI

I’d be surprised if that’s precisely what they said, because it is wrong. ADIs are not on the list of recognised professions, but they are on the list of discretionary professions used internally by the Passport Office.

Can ADIs sign passport applications?

The official public answer is no. However, the Passport Office can apply discretion and might (and quite possibly, often does) accept an ADI as a countersignatory.

Just bear in mind that the countersignatory also needs to have known the applicant for at least two years. Internally, this can also be shortened at the Passport Office’s discretion, but it means most ADIs will be asking for two lots of discretion, since most will not have known the applicant for two years. Indeed, the internal SOP refers to one year – and most ADIs will not have known most pupils for even that long.

I’ve taken on a few new pupils recently, all of them referrals from one who had recently passed. All of them had had previous driving lessons with other instructors.

The first was a girl who had been let down on test day by her instructor and she had (at the point I took her on) lost her money. The large company the ADI worked for had initially said it was nothing to do with them, but they have since backed down and refunded her (which they should have done as soon as she complained).

On her first lesson, she told me she wasn’t very good at parallel parking. I got her to try it for me and it was the bloody one-turn-this-way-one-turn-that-way-and-when-the-target-car’s-light-cluster-lines-up-in-Sagittarius-with-the-moon-rising-turn-one-turn-again-keep-moving-all-the-time rigmarole, which wasn’t helped by the fact I was using a Transit van as the target vehicle, and that stupid method relies on looking diagonally through the target (it’s even better if they try it behind an HGV).

I asked if she’d mind me showing her a method which works every time, and she jumped at the chance. I ran through it with her once, then talked her through a try by herself, and she got it in first time.

I explained that the method she’d been taught could only get close to being right every time if the target car was always a standard saloon and was parked correctly itself. If it was away from the kerb, then she’d finish away from the kerb. If the target car was parked at an angle, she would either finish further from the kerb, or possibly hit it. And since the angle her car moved to was dependent on the target having a short rectangular footprint (set by looking through it diagonally), using anything with a longer footprint – like a stretch limo, a van, or a lorry – reduced the angle too much and resulted in finishing further from the kerb.

I pointed out that the method I had just shown her didn’t give a damn about the target car (other than not hitting it) and used the kerb as the primary reference instead of the target car’s light clusters.

She’d only had one lesson with me, and immediately referred a friend. This one had done over 20 hours of lessons, but – and I checked this repeatedly to verify it, and it is sadly absolutely true – had never done a single roundabout, not been off a straight industrial road, and had not done any of the manoeuvres. She felt she wasn’t getting anywhere.

I got her to drive from her home, around several roundabouts, down the new Gedling Access Road (with roundabouts), through Burton Joyce and Stoke Bardolph, and finally to somewhere we could do a parallel park. Along the way, I’d noticed she was leaving a huge gap between herself and the cars in front when we stopped at traffic lights. After the first few times, I said ‘you’ve been taught ‘tyres and tarmac’ haven’t you?’ She had, so I explained how that doesn’t work in most cars, invariably leads to a four-metre gap that other cars might try to get into, and which means fewer cars get through the lights if they have short cycles. I showed her a better way to determine where to stop, where she had enough space to get out if the car in front broke down, was far enough back so it wouldn’t hit her if it rolled back a little and would ensure she didn’t frustrate drivers behind.

It’s funny, but I ditched TAT (tyres and tarmac) within weeks of qualifying, because I saw that it didn’t work. I just can’t understand why other instructors still teach it when they can see it is wrong for themselves.

Once we got to a suitable location, I showed her how to parallel park, then talked her through doing it herself, then once more with me saying less. She got it in first time both times.

Then I have another pupil who had also been taught that same ridiculous parallel parking method outlined above. I asked him do it for me three times using different cars. He got in the first time, was a bit wider the second, and was nearly a metre away from the kerb the third time (no observations at all in any of them). I was a bit sneaky with the third car, because the kerb has a very slight bend. The third was very wide simply because that damned method is always in relation to the target car. And all three attempts were further back than I was happy with (and all with no observations, because it was done in a continuous movement).

I explained that on his test he pretty much has one chance to get it right if he is asked to do this manoeuvre and obviously, if he was as wide as on that third attempt, he would fail. I asked if he’d mind me showing him a method that works every time, which uses the kerb as a reference point and not the target car, as his method did. He was happy with that.

I just talked him through it, and he got it in three times running – about 15cm from the kerb each time.

Then, a few months ago, I took on another referred pupil who had been repeatedly let down by her previous instructor – brought to head by the fact she had her test booked, but her instructor now said she couldn’t take her. Actually, as an aside, I took on another quickly afterwards – they were both friends learning with that same instructor, but because they were Muslims, they had specifically chosen a female instructor to begin with.

The first pupil could drive, but I told her on the first lesson with me she was checking her mirrors far too much. She was like one of those nodding dogs people have on the rear parcel shelf, routinely going through all three mirrors. On the second lesson, we were going around a gentle bend and I had to grab the wheel as she strayed towards oncoming traffic. She’d gone for a 3-mirror check when she should have been steering.

I pulled her over and said I’d mentioned she was checking too often last time, but what just happened was precisely why it was a very bad idea, and she had got to stop it. She agreed, and then told me her previous instructor had told her to check her mirrors every three seconds. I queried that, but that was what she believed she’d been told. I said, ‘you’re spending more time looking behind than you are in front! Does that make any sense to you?’ She agreed it didn’t. And she passed first time.

Every time I take someone on with previous experience, they seem to have been taught something as if it were chiselled on one of the tablets given to Moses, and yet it is utterly wrong or unworkable.