An email from DVSA reports that the lease at the Beeston Business Park “has been terminated”, and the last test there will be on Tuesday 26 July, 2016. My first – and absolutely sincere – reaction was: thank God for that!
From 1 August, tests will be conducted from The Village Hotel in Chilwell. This is a temporary arrangement, though they don’t say for how long. However, there is a McDonalds and a Costa next door, and I will put money on it that McDonalds and Costa don’t start sticking up stupid notes everywhere forbidding instructors from leaving the waiting room or holding the front door open for more than 10 seconds “because it messes up the air conditioning”, as if none of the other residents ever do so.
Apart from the very pleasant couple who run the cafe in the Beeston Business Centre, who I will miss, everyone else who works there detests the presence of DVSA and driving instructors. If anything goes wrong (blocked toilets), it is blamed on ADIs, and although all those pathetic notes are in the Centre Manager’s name, it is the stupid bitch in reception who is responsible. The manager is just too spineless to stand up to her.
But back to Chilwell. The arrangement is similar to that at Clifton – instructors are to wait in their cars and the examiners will come out to them. There is no waiting room, and no toilet facilities – though as I have already said, there is a McDonalds and a Costa just across the road. Furthermore, McDonalds and Costa are open from early in the morning until after tests conclude, and they are open weekends (at Beeston, the place is shut on weekends). I also note that there is a Starbucks in The Village, and I am assuming this is accessible to the public without them having to be members (I don’t like Starbucks and won’t be using it).
DVSA adds the note:
…access to ‘The Village Hotel Nottingham’ venue is only available to those candidates attending for test; you won’t be allowed to use this site for practice either during or outside of working hours (including weekends)
I can guarantee that there will be some arseholes who ignore that and try to practice bay park in there.
DVSA notes also that they have a long-term solution in the pipeline, and are working towards securing a lease for the site they have in mind. They have wisely not identified the site this time – when they did that with the current Beeston location, it was quickly gridlocked by the aforementioned arsehole instructors.
As far as I’m concerned, moving away from that Beeston Business Park is the best thing that’s happened in a long time. Good riddance to it.
An email alert from DVSA notes that there will be a local meeting at Beeston on 22 June 2016 providing more information about the relocation.
A number of my pupils (or their friends) attended the Download festival last weekend. I remember saying to one of them last Wednesday that it looked like they were going to have good weather for it (at the time, it was in the high 20s and very sunny). Note to self: stick to your day job and leave bad weather forecasts to the Met Office and Exacta.
You see, on the morning of the first day of the festival we had one of those downpours that needed a whole chapter to itself in The Bible. And then we had some more throughout the weekend. Download was under about a foot of what they were calling “mud custard”, and as long as I live, I will never understand how anyone can have a good time in such conditions.
The very idea of standing in a field for three days, unable to go to the loo, does nothing for me. Doing it in mud, the liquid part of which is going to be around 10-20% human urine (let’s not speculate on how much of the solid part is… no, let’s not even go there), trying to eat while covered in it, and sleeping in a tent in a similar state does even less. But as this video clearly shows, not everyone feels the same.
The video of this guy’s wacky dance moves has gone viral. TeamRock has apparently tracked him down and named him as Aaron Woods. He has become a worldwide celebrity overnight.
I was looking forward to the Euro 2016 competition. Naively, perhaps, the thought of violence among the fans hadn’t even occurred to me – until reports began to surface of incidents between police and English supporters in the days before Saturday’s match.
You can get into the argument about whether they are true “fans” or not until the cows comes home – the fact remains that they ARE English, they ARE there, and there ARE a lot of them. The single picture above makes it clear that it’s not just a “small minority”. Clearly, a very large number of those at the Euros are so incapable of holding their drink, many will fall to violence two seconds after sniffing a pint of beer.
Every single one of them should be deported. When they get back, their passports should be confiscated for life, and any one of them who already has a criminal record should be chemically castrated so that they can’t breed (although most of them have probably already been doing that since they were fourteen). This is exactly what happens when you don’t punish people when they’re younger, and it needs to stop.
Mind you, if England is portrayed as being “full” of football hooligans, it has to be said that Russia can boast a similar title – with the word “hooligan” replaced by “psychopath”. Russian media is incapable of seeing the truth in anything, be it world events or football, and God forbid that it should admit to any blame lying with its own people, some of whom had managed to get into the ground for the match with martial arts equipment. If what I saw on TV was anything to go by, some of them were pretty much trying to kill people (and yes, Mr Russian reporter, that’s what your psychopathic countryman is trying to do when he is seen repeatedly stamping on someone’s head, or launching his whole weight into a punch to someone’s face).
As it happens, Uefa has threatened to expel both Russia and England from the competition. Personally, I think they should do it right now – kick England and Russia out today.
Although it is unlikely to do anything for the collective Russian psyche, which is about 90 years behind the rest of the world at the best of times, it might provide a suitable wake-up call over here.
Complaints by residents concerning learners are usually dealt with by sticking up a notice in the test centre waiting room. However, DVSA has taken this unusual step of sending out an email alert regarding certain areas around the Alvaston Test Centre in Derby.
We’ve recently received correspondence from residents living in the area, particularly around Sevenlands Drive, Colwell Drive and Mountfield Way.
I often see notices in my local test centres but they invariably refer to places I don’t use myself (I sometimes have to look them up to find out where they are). In areas I do use, I make sure I don’t get in the residents’ way – I would rather terminate a manoeuvre and start again when it is clear than try to work around someone waiting for us. But I am in a minority on that even in Nottingham.
I can’t really comment on the Alvaston situation. It’s either idiot residents making a mountain out of a molehill – or idiot instructors making a molehill into a mountain.
A lot of people use Bach’s Rescue Remedy (or something similar, like Kalms) for their nerves when driving – especially on their tests. Someone found the blog today on the search term “can bachs rescue remedy make you over the drink drive limit because it contains alcohol[?]”
The original Bach’s extracts contained up to 40% of alcohol by volume. These days, I believe that ‘original’ Rescue Remedy only contains 27%. And some modern versions are alcohol-free. What does this mean in practice? Well, a pint of normal strength beer (3.5% alcohol) would contain 19.9mls of ethanol (which is what alcohol is). One of the alcohol-based Rescue Remedy products in the 20ml size would only be anywhere near this… IF it were neat (100%) alcohol to begin with, and IF you used a whole container of it at a time. It isn’t neat, and you only use a few drops of it at a time.
However, ‘original’ Rescue Remedy is only about 27% alcohol in the first place, so a whole 20ml container of it would be equivalent to just under a third of a pint of beer. And since a 20ml container contains between 20-30 doses, each dose is equivalent to less than 10mls (or two teaspoons) of normal beer.
So, unless you were already so close to being over the limit that a couple of teaspoons of beer took you over, the answer is no. If you are that close to being over the limit, that’s your problem. Rescue Remedy cannot take you over the drink drive limit – not in the UK, at any rate – if you haven’t been drinking already. However, if you live somewhere they have a zero-tolerance alcohol limit, and if you had just squirted the stuff into your mouth when you got pulled over, a breath test might be a bit unpredictable, so you’d be better off getting one of the alcohol-free types.
There are alcohol-free version for kids, the spray version is only water-based, and you can get it in tablet, pastille, chewing gum, and even rub-in cream form.
The original type does. But they do alcohol-free versions. The water-based sprays, and tablet, pastille, and chewing gum variants are alcohol-free. They even do a cream you rub on to your skin.
How much alcohol is in one drop of Rescue Remedy/Bachs?
You really should stop overthinking this.
The maximum amount of alcohol it will contain is 40% by volume. You’d have to drink several entire bottles of Bachs/Rescue Remedy in one go to get the same amount of alcohol as found in a pint of normal beer – and that’s assuming it’s the original type that has alcohol in it. One dose contains negligible alcohol unless you are already drunk.
In short, you’d have to drink three or four bottles neat, and if you’re doing that, it’s your own fault. The same is true if you’ve already been drinking and you then get pulled over. And there is no alcohol in the pastilles, chewing gum, or cream.
What is Grape Alcohol?
For all practical purposes, it is brandy. Both grape alcohol and brandy are produced by distilling either wine or wine ‘must’ (pomace). Brandy for drinking is usually higher quality, and is distilled from wine. Grape alcohol isn’t usually meant for drinking by itself and is made from the cheaper pomace. The original Rescue Remedies were made using genuine brandy, I believe (usually this is at least 35% alcohol). These days, they use grape alcohol (at 27% alcohol).
Can I use grape alcohol for anxiety?
For driving, absolutely not, under any circumstances. Grape alcohol is brandy, so you’d be drink-driving. You should not drink alcohol to calm your nerves, because it also impairs your reactions.
Can alcoholics take Rescue Remedy?
The alcohol-free types, yes. I don’t want to say that it’s OK to take the regular kind, because it depends on the individual. A quick squirt might not do any harm whatsoever for some alcoholics, but if the person gets it into their head that they’re taking alcohol…? It’s up to you.
Can Rescue Remedy make you drunk?
If you use the alcoholic type as per the label, no. If you drank a lot of it – and I mean several bottles at the same time – then it could. But anyone choosing this way to get drunk would be crazy, as it would cost about 10-20 times the price of a bottle of cheap cider.
Can it take you over the limit?
Technically, yes, the alcoholic type could. But if you already had so much alcohol in your system that two drops of Rescue Remedy was going to make any difference, it would just serve you right. On its own – if you haven’t already been drinking – no, it can’t take you over the limit.
Is it illegal to drive on Rescue Remedy?
No. Even if you used the kind which contains alcohol and comes in 20ml bottles, you’d need to drink at least ten bottles of the stuff in one go to imbibe the equivalent of two pints of beer. Even if that still seems a likely possibility, the fact that it would cost you over £50 to do it suggests you perhaps ought not to operate any sort of machinery – for your good, and everyone else’s.
Isn’t it just the alcohol that calms you down?
No. You are not taking enough alcohol to have any inebriating effect if you use the recommended dosage.
Nothing calms you down – except your own mind (or beta blockers, which are a prescription medicine). Rescue Remedy (and the like) effectively don’t have anything active in them (they are diluted dozens of times to get the final product). Even if they did contain pharmacologically significant amounts of the plant extracts in them, they simply don’t do anything.
If anyone claims that Rescue Remedy calms them down, it is all in their mind. That’s not necessarily a bad thing – if it works, it works – but it is not a proper medicine. It is a placebo, of benefit only to those susceptible to the placebo effect.
Is there anything that can help my anxiety/nerves when driving?
Following on from that story about the Americans shooting a gorilla as a precautionary measure in their attempts to deal with crass stupidity on the part of their citizens, at least the Aussies are more sanguine about such episodes.
If the victim had survived in this case, then she would automatically have been in the finals for the 2016 Darwin Awards. Such was the level of stupidity on display.
It happened in the Daintree National park, in Northern Queensland. The presence of signs, local warnings about it being a known crocodile habitat, Queensland’s “be croc-wise” safety policy, and I would suspect a fair degree of understanding of the dangers of living in Australia in the first place, not to mention those associated with just being Australian at all did not deter this 47-year old woman from attempting to swim in waist-deep water. At night. It seems that the only thing she didn’t do was bring some extra crocodiles with her just to be sure. Unfortunately for her, though, one of the resident crocs was also taking a swim nearby, and saw its chance for a snack.
Unlike the Americans, who you can almost imagine tripping over themselves to get their guns in order to blow away a gorilla who had not actually made any threatening moves towards a four-year-old (some reports say he was actually three) child whose parents had been so monstrously neglectful as to allow him to climb through a fence and fall into a moat surrounding an enclosure, the Aussies are a little more logical over this incident. A local politician, Warren Enstch, said:
This is a tragedy but it was avoidable. There are warning signs everywhere up there.
You can only get there by ferry, and there are signs there saying watch out for the bloody crocodiles.
You can’t legislate against human stupidity. If you go in swimming at 10 o’clock at night, you’re going to get consumed.
Meanwhile, Australian police have been practising the art of understatement:
We would hold grave fears for the welfare of the woman.
I saw this on the news this morning. Zoo keepers – sorry, “officials” – shot dead a gorilla in a zoo in Cincinnati, after a four-year-old boy climbed through a barrier and fell into a moat.
The gorilla made no threatening moves towards the boy, and was shot as a precaution (hey, this is America, right?) The gorilla, who was named Harambe, was a western lowland gorilla – a critically-endangered species.
No mention is made of the boy’s parents, who really are the ones who should have been in the guns’ sights. What the hell were they doing letting a four-year-old run loose and allowing him do something so ridiculously stupid? And what does it say about the job they’ve done of bringing him up if he was dumb enough to behave this way?
When I was four I wouldn’t have been allowed to run around like that, and especially not in a zoo. And since I can remember when I was four, I wouldn’t have tried to climb into an animal enclosure – my parents would have told me not to, and I would have listened.
I saw this in my newsfeeds. It’s the story of someone who wanted to be a driving instructor, handed over £2,000 for his training to Pass N Go, and then couldn’t get his money back when he was diagnosed with Type 1 diabetes (the severe type, which meant he could no longer drive).
Chris James, from Newcastle, had spent a lot of his working life travelling abroad and wanted to settle back in the UK as an instructor. There was a clause in the contract he signed with Pass N Go which said he only had 14 days during which he could cancel the deal. He says he had had “some issues which delayed… starting training”, but then he was diagnosed and it came as a shock.
On the strength of this, you immediately take sides against Pass N Go… until you hear their side of the story.
Simon Kernohan from Pass N Go says that Mr James initially postponed the commencement of his training because he said his house in Taiwan had been flooded. As a result, his allocated trainer was sitting around “twiddling his thumbs”, and when Mr Kernohan tried to contact Mr James, he was unsuccessful. He added:
He’s a nice enough fella and I feel sorry for him but we have already bent over backwards to help him out.
You can see it from both sides. If Mr James had simply been diagnosed with diabetes then you’d hope that Pass N Go would have been more sympathetic. Of course, the usual cynics out there would disagree – all training companies are bad as far as they’re concerned! However, most instructors will have experienced the pupil who misses ten times more lessons than anyone else, and yet always has a plausible excuse. One of mine some years ago had so many ailing grandparents that I’m sure her father must have been a polygamist, and she cost me a fortune in lost lessons until I told her I couldn’t afford not to teach her anymore.
So you can’t simply rule out the possibility that Mr James had already burnt his bridges somewhat with the flooded Taiwan home story.
Although Florence and the Machine aren’t really my cup of tea, this story – in particular, the YouTube videos – honestly brought a tear to my eye.
The young girl she visited is apparently called Karinya, and she’s in a hospice suffering from a rare form of cancer (and most people will realise what that means as far as life expectancy is concerned). Karinya couldn’t attend a concert the band gave in Austin, Texas, due to her illness – so Florence and the band’s guitarist, Rob Ackroyd, went to her.
Any half decent driver will already be aware of the shocking behaviour of many people who use the roads. If you drive for a living – especially if you are considered to be a “professional” driver – apart from the fact that you use the roads more and you see more, you’re also likely to notice more.
Regular readers will know that I often publish registration numbers of people I’ve witnessed behaving badly on the roads. It makes me feel a lot better, and the jackasses involved can’t really make an issue out of it because I simply state the truth – they were driving as I describe (and the camera doesn’t lie). However, two similar events this morning got me wondering if the owners of companies are aware of the potential damage being done to their businesses by the Neanderthals they seem to employ to drive their vehicles.
These companies probably spend a fortune in time and money on advertising, a decent website, or a lot of arseing about on social media (I’ve never understood how a “professional” can migrate their entire business to Facebook – it’s almost as logical as my previous “professional” company’s decision to switch their official font from Times New Roman to Comic Sans), and yet the negative impact just one monkey in one of their vans can have doesn’t seem to be something they even consider.
Speaking for myself, I will quite happily boycott a company (or a particular outlet) if I get poor service. For example, I will never again set foot in the new McDonalds branch in Clifton as a result of the absolutely crap service from the moment it opened. For similar reasons, I will never use KFC in Colwick, because if there is even one person (or car) in the queue you’re looking at a minimum 10-minute wait (longer in most cases) per person, most of it because the spotty-faced oiks who frequent most KFC branches get to the front of the queue before even starting to consider what they might want. The drive-thru ordering intercom is frequently broken (i.e. vandalised) and the zit-faces in the queue will still take 10 minutes to order while another zit-face on the till writes it all down – and you know that this time the absence of multitasking via the ordering computer means that they will only start to process each order after the piece of paper has been transferred, and after the previous order has been completed. As soon as you see the notepad and pencil being used, that’s the cue to reverse out and go to Greggs, instead.
There are numerous fish and chip shops I won’t use because they’ve never got anything ready. I’ve come to the conclusion that those awards for “best chippie” they all have splurged across banners outside have about as much value as the NVQs my previous company used to issue to shop floor staff for proving they could walk and chew gum at the same time (“equivalent to an ‘A’ Level”, they used to say). They can’t all be “the best”. The only way a chip shop can hope to get one of these meaningless awards for “best chips” is if they cook each batch to order, and you know that that’s exactly what they’re doing it when you see half a dozen or more people standing around inside waiting like a scene out of Dawn of the Dead – which defeats the whole point of going for some chips in the first place. One thing you don’t want to hear when you walk into a chippie is “can I take your order, please?” It means they are putting you in a queue instead of just scooping some ready-prepared chips into a paper bag (Captain Cod on Perry Road, take note). Some of them will try to take your money before informing you that “we’re just waiting for chips”, and it’s got to the point where I specifically ask “have you got chips ready?” when I walk in. If they haven’t I walk out again.
Sandwich shops can be even worse. Often run by a single person, there’s every likelihood that when you go into one she (it’s usually a she) will be trying to fulfil a telephone order for the local building site, and will be in the middle of frying 300 rashers of bacon and 100 eggs on an underpowered electric hob using a normal-sized non-stick frying pan (I’m not making that up, either – Greedy Guts on Woodborough Road take note). You might get a sideways glance from her (or him) if you’re lucky, (The Cob Shop on Andover Road and Munch Bites on Nottingham Road, both in Basford, and Spoilt For Choice on Cinder Hill Road take note). And there’s usually some filthy-looking retard standing in the doorway smoking wherever you go, and I absolutely detest the smell of cigarettes when I’m around food.
But I digress. If they were the types of companies I was ever likely to use, Aspley Workwear and Midland Commercial Cleaners would now be on my list of places never to do business with. And all because of the most horrendous behaviour by respective drivers of two of their vans this week. Undertaking, speeding, and tail-gating are three things that do it for me.
