Have you ever done a ‘speed awareness course’? If you answer ‘no’ then you’re either an overseas person or not a real person. I don’ think they have such things in foreign lands. In America you get fined for speeding. There’s never a question there of taking away the right to drive any more than there is taking away your gun(s). In Russia the rich people speed all the time; race up and down the boulevards in their Ferraris and hot Mercs. If the poor speed in their 1973 Ladas (almost an impossibility) they just go to Siberia for a few years, then a few more.

But here, if you get caught speeding, you either take the ‘points’, on your driving licence, which don’t make prizes, and a fine, OR, you can do a ‘speed awareness course’. Which costs about the same as the fine, but you get no points on your licence. Though the insurance companies are aware (all data is public) and reserve the right to SCREW YOU OVER at any/every opportunity. Because they’re bastards.

Speeding is what normal, sensible people call ‘driving’. It’s called ‘getting where you’re going’, rather than dithering around polluting the fucking atmosphere with no apparent goals or aims or desire to ever get anywhere, as most seem to do. Generally in the ‘fast lane’, with their lights permanently on hi-beam.

I know every speed camera on the North Circular Road. Intimately. I drive my dad home every Friday night and have done for years. But they must have put a mobile or temporary one and apparently I was going a bit faster than the limit. I didn’t even try to deny it because if I don’t know there’s a camera there then I will be speeding. I can’t help it.

I’ve done a speed awareness course before. Big surprise there. You can only do one every 5 years so I have to be careful now. But the idea behind them is simple. To make people aware of the increased danger of driving too fast. Not the danger of getting caught, that’s pretty obvious, but danger to ‘others’. And rather than just say that, they spend 4 fucking hours (which you never get back) showing you graphs and charts and scenarios and death statistics and horror photos and engage in a brainwashing process to pre-condition you that every time the speedo goes over 30 you start involuntarily sweating. And it works. Generally until you get in the car to come home. At which point ‘the race is on’ once more. It’s a pantomime. But you have no choice.

And the Oscar for ‘an actor looking engaged and interested when HE’S BORED FUCKING SHITLESS!!!’ goes to…

Me.

Happy monday, drive carefully.

A xxxx