Lesson 4 (in learning to drive at the age of 42).

This is how I felt for 2 hours …

It rained most of today, and I had every expectation of being out in the car in terrible weather.  Along with general not-fun-ness at work, I again wasn’t really looking forward to today’s lesson.  I’m even more certain now that had I cancelled last weeks lesson, I wouldn’t have gone back, such was my mood this evening.  But I didn’t cancel, and that meant I was ready at 5:40pm, which is a good job, because my instructor turned up 20 minutes early.

The rain had backed off to an annoying British drizzle, and luckily about 15 minutes into the lesson, it stopped alltogether.  That meant I never had the fun of turning the wipers on and off instead of indicating, but I’m sure there’ll be a chance at that later.  What I did have fun with, was driving.  I actually drove, for nearly two hours.  Two stalls, one sharp stop, and a little bit of uncertainty, but otherwise, two hours of driving.  I enjoyed it.  I actually enjoyed it.  I really feel that stuff has fallen into place and that now it’s purely a matter of practice and making it muscle memory.

This is how I looked for 2 hours …

I think my instructor was pleased.  She certainly seemed pleased about the lack of near-death roundabout entrances and the dearth of nose-against-windscreen moments.

I still can’t describe where we went for the middle of the lesson, but I know we got there through Beeston (around that double bend people treat like part of the street), and we came back through Chilwell.  I had the weird experience of having no clue where I was one moment, and then suddenly recognising a bit of wall at a junction, and everything shifting into place on the way back.

Pulling away was mostly smooth, stopping was about a billion times better, and gear changes were much smoother.  I think I can drive (this is probably dangerous).

The highlight of today was ‘reversing around a corner’.  Can I just say, who in their right fucking mind would ever do this?  You have to stop, potentially on a road with traffic, and then reverse into that traffic for a bit, and then reverse around a corner you can’t clearly see unless you break your neck, while also being able to check 3 mirrors and another blind spot.

Why!?

Just drive in and do a 3-point-turn for fucks sake.  I mean seriously.

I did it twice, not bad each time, I think I finally have some clutch control.  The scary thing is that as soon as I look in a mirror, I speed up because I lift the clutch so I’ll have to work on that.

Other moments I enjoyed, two roundabouts where I stopped and then pulled away without using the handbrake, just the foot brake and clutch control and doing 30mph on a road with a 30mph limit, looking in my rear view mirror and being able to see traffic as far back as the horizon.

If that was you tonight – then I make no apologies!

Also if you’re,

1. the driver who pulled out from a left-hand side-street without stopping or looking, literally 10 feet in front of me, I hope you enjoy the change of trousers, the look on your face was awesome.
2. the woman who tried to overtake me on a right-hand bend, you need to retake your test pet.

All-in-all, a really enjoyable two hours.  Hard work, don’t get me wrong, probably a 6 on the ‘how sweaty was my right armpit’ scale, but fun, rewarding hard work.

Today was lesson 3 in ‘learning to drive in your forties’.  I will warn you now, this post contains emotional scenes, but no flash photography.  Also there is swearing.  If you prefer to think of me as rational, sane, and emotionally stable, you may wish to skip reading this.  If you consider the thought of grown men crying, weak, or if you believe learning things about me you don’t like will affect how you deal with me on a day to day basis, you may want to skip reading this.  If you suffer from a weak stomach, then you should do stomach exercises.

Today was a shit day at work, after a few shit days.  As I was getting a lift home, I was thinking the last thing in the world I wanted to do, was get in a car for two hours and learn to drive.  Or, if lesson 2 was anything to go by, spend two hours being frustrated by not being able to drive.  When my instructor texted me to say she was running late, was I still okay for the lesson, I almost cancelled.  But I knew if I had cancelled, I would probably find it easier to cancel the next one, and the next one, and the next one and suddenly, I’m not learning to drive at all.

So I said yes, it would be fine.  As I sat waiting though, and it got later and later, I realised a 2 hour lesson was going to mean getting in very late, and then having to sort food and other stuff.  So when she arrived (only 20 minutes late in the end, but it had taken her around 1 hour 30 minutes to get to me, instead of 40) and I went out, I asked her if we could keep the lesson to 1 hour.  She said yes, seemed fine about it and off we went.

But here’s the thing – now I’m sitting in the driver’s seat over-thinking 9 billion things at once, as well as trying to drive the bloody car.  Had I complicated her plans, was she going to be losing out on money because she could have booked that second hour slot with someone else?  Was she secretly pissed off at me?  Was she wondering why she’d driven for 1 hour 30 minutes only to be told by the client that they couldn’t be bothered to drive for 2 hours?  It’s this kind of social interaction that drives me insane (or it’s because I’m insane that this kind of social interaction confuses me).

That feeling that I’d somehow let her down, pissed her off, and made her pissed off at me stuck with me for the rest of the hour.  You’re probably laughing, you’re likely thinking ‘what a dick, why does he over-think this shit’, and if you are, you should read the rest of my blog, which gives clear indication of my neurosis, and then you don’t need to ask.

The bottom line is that if you’re having a conversation with me and you think I’m handling it, then I’m actually just winging it and hoping I don’t make myself look like a complete and utter dick, I’m aiming for ‘mostly dick’.  One of the hardest things about learning to drive, is that it requires you to sit in a confined space with someone you don’t know, and both listen to them and also perform for them.

And perform I did.  After the car park trip with Greté, I did what any good engineer does in a situation where they find themselves frustrated by being unable to control something, I did some reading.  A colleague of mine at work said much the same thing yesterday and I laughed because it’s true.  I found a bunch of websites that talk about clutch control, and driving, and I read and thought about it, and worked it through, and I finally realised what all the talk was about.

So today, after doing my cockpit drill, starting the car and making my observations, I pulled away from the kerb gently, slowly and smoothly.  Half my brain was still panicking about the social interaction with my driving instructor, but the rest was focused on a feeling of exultation as I proved to myself, the most important person in this whole learning to drive thing, that I could do it.

I really might just be able to do this.  We turned left at the end of the street, without coming to a full stop because the traffic was clear.  We drove down to a roundabout, turned right, and pulled away, without stalling, and with the car under full control.

I started to believe I might just be able to do this.  After last week, this was a massive change, last week left me feeling like it was never going to happen, but here I was, just over four hours in, beginning to think it might be possible.

We drove up towards Stapleford again, making good progress.  I had a couple of fumbles, one left turn in which I started thinking I was clear, but then didn’t get moving quickly enough, and my instructor decided I hadn’t been clear, left me poking out into the road.  I stalled it twice, my instructor ‘took the pedals’ and stalled it, but we finally got onto the road and moving.  After the apparent success on the first week, my instructor had hoped to do ‘some manoeuvres’ in the second week, which we all know means ‘a 3 point turn’.  However, the shocking start last week meant instead we stuck to just driving around.

I think my new found skill this week gave my instructor some confidence and we pulled up in a quiet road and she explained a 3 point turn to me.  To anyone who has decent spatial awareness and an understanding of how car steering works, the basics are pretty obvious, but I tried to listen without looking impatient.  I knew this was it.

This was my test.  I didn’t want to be here, my instructor probably didn’t want to be here, I was distracted, she was pissed off and there were people using the road I was on that were about to become pissed off.  But I wanted this.

I wanted to see if I could drive this car purely under clutch control.  After she’d finished the instructions (which she admitted, were more complicated to describe than they were to execute), she asked if I had any questions.  Just one, I said, no use of the accelerator at all right?  Correct she said.

That’s when it happened, I prepared the car, and then I carried out a reasonable three point turn.  My first go at reversing the car, my first go at driving totally under clutch control, and my first go at not crashing into a kerb.  From the position we finished it, we reversed straight back a bit, and then did another one.  A slight stall at the start, bringing the clutch up too far, but then I reset and off we went.  I was pretty happy.  Let’s be frank, I was pretty, fucking, happy.

Suddenly in my head things fell into place.  The only reason you’re ‘giving it a little gas’ when you pull away is because you’re expecting to be doing more than 1 mph at a junction.  In Tesco car park, pulling out of the parking spaces the other night, I’d been ‘giving it a little gas’ totally unnecessarily.  I need to go back, and just pull out of those spaces just using the clutch.  Maybe when you’ve been driving a few years you’re more eager on the accelerator because you know how the car will behave, or because you’re capable of moving away from those spaces at more than 1mph.  But I’d been getting ahead of myself, I needed to learn how to drive the car without even touching the accelerator.  As long as you don’t fully engage the clutch, it won’t stall.  It was a revelation.  It was like you’d spent your life reading about art but had never seen any.  Spent your life hearing about divine food but had never eaten any.

Well okay, perhaps it wasn’t that poignant, but it was certainly good news.  I drove back home on cloud nine.  60mph on the A52 at one stage, 5th gear.  Right turns, left turns, roundabouts, all with a reduced feeling of fear about pulling away.  Don’t get me wrong, you’d be able to tell I was a learner driver, I’m still pulling away slowly, waiting too long before getting into 2nd, changing into 3rd too early, wandering around my lane a bit, stopping 8 feet before the line, you know, the usual shit.

But in my head, I believe.  I believe I can do this.

So I got home, and my instructor said, “2 hours next week?” and the flood of social anxiety returned like a crashing wave of cold death.  “Sure”, I replied, and got out of the vehicle.  I made some lame joke about having to get used to checking in the wing mirror for traffic when getting out as a driver, where-as when I was a passenger, I was never too worried about knocking over the odd pedestrian ((this was a joke, after an incident as a passenger in the late 80’s when a taxi almost took the door off a car I was getting out of in a train station, I do check for cars, cycles and people before opening the door)), and then we parted ways.

I got into the house, immediately said something petty to my patient wife ((she forgave me)), and then I went upstairs and had a little cry.  I hadn’t realised how much I needed this.  How much I need to be able to drive.  How much guilt I’ve been carrying, how much of a relief it will be to pass the test.  I certainly hadn’t realised quite how emotional it would be, how wound up I would be before lessons, and how much effect the actual lesson would have on my mood.

I may have only carried out two 3-point turns, and you may be wondering why the fuck I was sobbing like a child who’s dropped an ice cream, but I was experiencing a rush of relief of epic proportions.

This might work.  This, might, actually, work.

Last time I spoke to my driving instructor, I said I was going to spend some time in Tesco car park just starting and stopping our car, to get used to the clutch and the whole routine of pulling away in a controlled fashion.  Greté was kind enough to go with me tonight, and we just got back.

I think in 50 minutes I managed to pull away in a controlled fashion once.  The other 99 attempts were roughly,

• 70 stalls before even leaving the parking bay.
• 20 juddering starts where I just about remember to keep enough petrol on to actually not stall.
• 7 starts where I accelerate almost out of control and then slow down again into something approaching reasonable speed.
• 2 reversing starts, which weren’t too bad actually, maybe I should drive everywhere backwards.

For added amusement, while doing slow laps we also had,

• 1 x very close pass to a cycle rack on the back of a van
• 1 x three miles per hour swerve out of the way of a parking vehicle
• several sharp stops
• far too many instances of stopping, and forgetting I was in gear before lifting my foot from the clutch.

All-in-all, much more like how I expected my first ever lesson to go.

Greté was great, and very patient and she only phantom-braked the once.

So I’m pretty much fine with steering, and my braking is getting better, but I’m really not getting the whole biting point and gentle application of petrol thing.  I guess it’ll come with time.

Next lesson is on Wednesday, not sure if I’ll ask Greté to give me another shot in Tesco’s again tomorrow.  I almost wish there was somewhere much more open, where I could practice pulling away without too much fear of driving into someting.  Tesco was pretty empty but there’s still plenty of stuff you could hit with an uncontrolled start.

At the time of writing this, I’m forty-two years old.  As you know, forty-two is the answer to life, the universe and everything, so what better time to start to learn to drive?  I covered some reasons why I left it so late here.  This post though, is about the process of learning.  I’m bad at starting stuff, but once I’ve started I’m usually pretty good at finishing.  It’s taken me a long time to start to learn to drive, and I had a couple of false goes over the last few years.  I half promised myself I’d learn before I was 40, and then I said I’d learn before I was 42, both of those deadlines came and went.

For me, more than half the problem is that I over-think the situation.  Those of you who know me will find this utterly hard to believe, but I over-analyse most stuff, dig out all the possible issues, and then present them as a bunch of negatives.  It makes me quite good at my job (especially when I then go on to present solutions to those issues), but it sometimes makes it hard to actually get stuff done especially outside of work where the pressure to deliver is lower.

So I talk myself out of a lot of things, because of the potential issues.  I don’t mean the risks of actually driving, I mean, in this case, the complexity of sorting out lessons.  For a long time my provisional driving license was an issue, until Grete sorted that for me, and then it was questions about who to book lessons with, and how, and when to fit them in, and how and when to book the theory test, and how the whole thing would work, and endless iterations of those same questions.

It’s very easy never to click ‘book lessons’ when those things ramp up in your brain.  I actually got to the point of getting some quotes last year, from BSM, and almost booked, until they sent me some spam SMS messages to my mobile phone (mandatory field on the quote form), and that smallest trigger put me off booking with them, and the whole process collapsed.

Eventually though, there comes a moment where I finally commit to something in my head.  At that point, the issues, complexity, problems, risks and blockers all just vanish.  I’ve committed, and I will proceed.  Such a day arrived three or four weeks ago, when I finally just logged on to the AA website, bought 10 hours worth of lessons, and booked the date for the first one.

So, on Wednesday 8th May, at 5:30pm, I finally sat in the driver’s seat of a four-wheeled, petrol-engined car with the intention of starting the engine and driving it for 2 hours.  For those of you who’ve had driving lessons, you know how this goes.  The instructor takes you through the cockpit drill, tells you how a car works, covers the basics of mirrors and the like.  After this stage, I guess how it progresses depends on your instructor.

My driving instructor likes to get her pupils driving.  Her theory is once you’re moving, you’ll learn everything else you’ll need to know.  So she drove us to a quiet spot, sat me in the driver’s seat, had me adjust everything, and then we set off.

What followed was two hours of a mixture of fear, exhilaration, panic, confusion, euphoria, confidence sapping mistakes, confidence building successes and armpit sweat.  With my driving instructor talking in one ear, and me pretending to look in the mirrors (really, I was just looking at the mirrors), we pulled away from the curb, slowly pulled back in again and jerked to a complete halt.  Brakes.  Must be more gentle on the brakes.  The first lesson continued with that theme, with me never quite getting to grips with slowing down gently.

But I’m jumping ahead!  We pootled along a road I knew quite well in a quiet estate, and met my first road junction in the 42 years since I arrived in this world – a mini-round-a-bout.  My instructor said, ‘we’re going straight across’, which is a phrase I have been using for many years.  This however, was the first time my brain ever formed the thought ‘I wonder if she means I should just drive straight over the middle’.  Luckily my hands, taking control because my brain had apparently shut down, turned the wheel and we navigated the deserted obstacle with reasonable ease.  Before I had a chance to fully realise I had just navigated a round-a-bout, my instructor coaxed me to a juddering sudden stop, and we were sitting in front of a right hand turn.

Thankfully, it was into a weird single lane traffic calming measure in which I had right-of-way and there wasn’t any traffic anyway.  I gently rounded the 90 degree bend and off we went.  It was at this point that I worked out where we were headed.  We were about to rejoin the busy B6002, which when we had left it 15 minutes before had been host to two lanes of almost stationary traffic.  It hadn’t changed, and as we approached and began to slow, I heard my instructor say, “We’re going right.”

I had hoped, to be fair, that in my first ever driving lesson, I’d have been pretty much turning left only.  I’m sure we could have gotten anywhere we needed to be with only left hand turns, and I was about to explain this to my instructor, when I realised the articulated truck to my right had stopped, leaving me a gap in one lane of traffic.  This was it then, this was the moment I was supposed to check for a gap to the left, and then gently pull out and hope nothing crushed me like an out of place insect.

I stalled.  Then magically, after restarting the car, I managed to find another gap and pull out, and gently pull away and to the surprise of everyone, not least myself, I changed into second gear.  I was doing 15 miles an hour, on a B road, with traffic in front, behind and to my right.  I wasn’t dead.  The car wasn’t crushed.  No one was banging on the window screaming at me.  This was going to be okay!

I don’t remember much else for a little while, as we drove further into Stapleford, other than my instructor saying at least four times, and I quote, “this is a horrible junction, sorry”.  I know we negotiated some junctions, some more right turns, and some straight ons, but frankly it’s a blur!  It was all heavy traffic, 6pm, people trying to get home, me trying not to hold them up!  Eventually we made it to another quiet estate, and my instructor took me through some t-junctions, road position, and some other critical things that maybe one day I’ll remember but for now, are merely a smudge in my mind.

I do remember learning how to do hill starts (both up, and downhill), and I remember feeling confident about gear changes.

But most of all, I remember braking hard, every time.

We drove around the estate some more, and onto, across and through some busier roads, but I wasn’t really conscious of where I was (despite knowing the area quite well), until eventually we approached what looked like a major road, and my instructor advised we were turning right.  I noticed we had stopped at some lights, and in front of me were two lanes of traffic, a central reservation, and then another two lanes.  Only after I had crossed the two lanes and turned right did I realise I had pulled onto the A52, and we were headed back towards the M1.

Slightly terrified about what was to transpire, I revelled in the brief feeling of safety provided by traffic-light controlled round-a-bouts in which I was going left in a feeder lane.  Then, well, then I was in the clear, on a road with a 70mph limit, with cars accelerating away from me.

I took a deep breath.  Told myself that I was a man, and this was a motor vehicle, and that I was in control of my own destiny, not living in fear of success, and I got the car into 5th and did ~50mph for a little while.

50mph!

Eventually, we arrived at another round-a-bout (going left again, thankfully), navigated some more roads, made it to the A6005, and then, made it home.

I’ve been a passenger in motor vehicles, usually in the front passenger seat, for many, many years, so the process of learning to drive for me isn’t just about learning to drive, but it’s not about forgetting bad driving behaviour either (I have none), it’s about forgetting passenger behaviour, and that was about to become very evident.

We pulled back into my street, and pulled over to the left of the road, and stopped (hard, of course).  At this point, for the past 20 odd years of my life, I open the door and get out of the vehicle.  Safe in the knowledge that the driver will put on the hand-break, put the car in neutral, stop the engine, and only then get out of the car.  I’ve done it a lot, I really have.  Four times a day on weekdays and twice at weekends for most of my adult life.

It was the slight edge of panic in my instructor’s voice, which had been absent for all of the journey, that alerted me to the fact that although the engine was running, the car was still in gear, and the hand-break was off, that I was about to try and get out of the car.

I had removed my seat belt, and I was in the process of opening the door.  Luckily, I still had my foot on the foot-break and the clutch all the way down.

We laughed, as I applied the hand-break and turned off the engine, but it’s the laugh of people who realise they almost destroyed two vehicles.

I disembarked, got graded, and walked into the house.  At this point, two things were evident to me.

Firstly, I would not be writing a long blog post about my first driving lesson, because I could barely form any coherent thought beyond ‘must sit down’.

Secondly, having my right arm glued to my body for the entire 2 hour lesson meant my right arm-pit was utterly drenched in sweat.  My left arm, moving between the wheel, gears and hand-break had fared much better.

I had survived my first driving lesson at the age of 42.  It hadn’t been anywhere near as bad as I feared, and I had proven to myself that I could handle the basics of driving a four wheeled vehicle on the public highway without hitting anything else.

I needed a lot of tea.