Old dog, ludicrous new tricks

A bona fide Holy Well, about four miles from my house. Note the road--yes, an actual UK road--approaching it. Note its massive width. This holy well is not dedicated to the patron saint of old Yank drivers living in England. If there is such a saint, please let me know.

If you had an old dog--a dog that had served you well, protected you and your family, was healthy and happy and still entertained you with her amusing tricks--would you demand that she learn new tricks just because you could?

Only if you were (tick one): A) an idiot B) a sadist C) the Driver and Vehicle Licensing Agency (DVLA) of the United Kingdom.

If you ticked all three (excuse me, but in the interest of reforming my Yank habits, I am using tick rather than check)....If you ticked all three, you would be right, although only C is truly demanded. Why, then, would you tick the other two? Because the examiners of C tend to issue trick instructions to applicants taking their practical exam, i.e., road test. I know this because:

A) On the written test (aka Theory Test, UK), there was a question regarding T junctions for which two answers were given in the official manual in different sections and BOTH were offered in the multiple choice section, but there was no way to choose both. Choosing one, however, gave you a 50-50 chance of being right. Or being wrong, as the case may be, and as my case was, giving me only a 98 on the test, not the 100 I was after.

B) My driving instructor told me today that, when negotiating a roundabout (US English: dealing with a traffic circle) the rule is that any exit from it that is directly opposite where one enters is taken from the left lane; any exit beyond the one directly opposite your entry is taken beginning in the right lane with a right turn signal, then moving to the left lane and issuing a left signal after the exit before that one...but never before that! Lest anyone mistake your intent, you see, and decide to crawl up your royal butt 100 yards early.....pant, pant, pant....but I digress.

So, my driving instructor said: "During the practical, if the examiner says (regarding a could-be-straight, could-be-slightly-right spoke off the roundabout wheel) 'Continue on this road,' then you are to regard the exit as a left/straight exit and enter from the left lane with left signaling throughout. If he says 'Take the second exit in the roundabout,' when referring to that self-same exit, then take the right lane in, signaling right, and moving over to the left after the previous exit, having checked the mirrors and given the left turn signal."

One exit, two ways to get there, two possibilities of instruction from the examiner, all the better to confuse someone already dealing with roads Americans would regard as cow paths, shifting one's perceptions and shift hand from right to left, and the demand for "green" driving practices. In effect, green driving means driving at the highest possible rate of speed in the highest possible gear. UNTIL one comes to a turn, at which point one is to make the turn in first gear (slammed right down there at 7-8 mph from 50 or so) without stalling out, double clutching, using a hand-over-hand technique on the steering wheel, but after using all three mirrors multiple times before, during and after the turn, and not hitting the cyclist who has just hit a cow pat and swerved out into the pothole in front of you, which you would ordinarily go around if a 16-wheel articulated lorry (tractor trailer to Yanks) had not just come around the next bend and was barreling toward you, its wheels barely missing the potholes on BOTH sides of the road.... (Solution: Back up a little into a "pulling off place" so the lorry can go whizzing by.)

But I digress again. This is really about roundabouts, which also pop up on one-lane roads; these should be approached as above using the left or right sides of said lane, as appropriate. There are also roundabouts with three lanes coming into them. MOST of these major roundabouts will have road markings such as a left arrow saying "Extr" (which any idiot would know meant Exeter) and a straight arrow saying Lskrd (which any idiot would know meant Liskeard, even if they didn't know how to pronounce it) and a right arrow saying Tav'stk (which any idiot would know meant Tavistock, pronunciation obvious.)

Got that? Got that part about feeding the fucking steering wheel through your hands at dead slow in gear with no clutching around acute corners, while swiveling your head through all three mirrors like Stevie Wonder on speed? Got the part about signalling at the right place, which means before your turn/exit but after any encroaching roadways on the side of the road you're headed, even if you've never been down that road before and hey, one patch of muddy track that's a street looks much like any other muddy patch of track that's a farm driveway, which doesn't count in the Signalling the Globally Perfect Moment sweepstakes.


Now then, here's another factoid or two. I have been driving for 46 years--as my instructor said, longer than he's been alive. I have never had a moving violation citation (the single one I ever got was dismissed after I pointed out the speed trap, etc., in court and agreed to pay of the State of Virginia, literally, a bounty for being STUPID enough to bother driving through a speed trap), and the only insurance claims I have had were when a deer committed suicide on my Geo and a fat lady who claimed she was going to her lung transplant doctor slammed the back of my Hyundai Accent with her monster pickup truck at the end of a controlled access highway exit.

I generally drove between 15,000 and 25,000 miles a year, in environments as disparate as New York City--Manhattan, often--and rural Georgia. And I've been doing it for 46 years.

I concluded something today, thinking about today's Drive and Despair session; I am an old dog. A safe dog, but an old one.

I was taught, by a Kennedy nephew who taught driving at my high school, to handle the steering wheel like Mario Andretti and the gear box like it was a precious Faberge egg. And now, for the next five weeks with the intent to pass this freaking test on round one, I'm going to endanger myself and everything on the road convincing my mind and body to handle the steering wheel like an old lady driver and the gear box like Mario Andretti.

Nuts.