So first of all – apologies for the delay.
There were no lessons for about three weeks and since they picked up again I have basically been struggling to find time to breathe, let along blog.
My most recent foray into the world of motoring is to learn about parallel parking, which is easier than I have been led to believe.
That is potentially because you don’t have to do it between two cars during the test and instead simply drive next to one and then reverse park behind it. I imagine that someone with my limited spatial awareness would struggle to actually park in this way if there was a third vehicle involved.
I have recently been thinking about positives and negatives as far as my driving is concerned. The positives are as follows – while a three week gap in the past would have resulted in a disaster movie-style lesson involving near death experiences, broken legs and CGI explosions (all in 3D at no extra charge) my first lesson back after the break was more a pootle around the city in which I didn’t stall, only got confused once and managed to navigate the by pass with a minimum of screaming.
The negatives are that I still occasionally mess up stopping distances and haven’t really grasped the concept of gearing down before the engine starts doing that weird juddery thing and I have to bang it into first before I stall. The key to this, I think, is consistency and confidence. Consistency is basically out of my hands.
Short of taking two weeks off work and driving every day there is little I can do about the working hours, over running meetings and sporadic bouts of breaking news that have stopped me getting to lessons in the past.
As far as confidence goes – we can but wait and see, I’m not exactly known for my shy and retiring nature but so far this seems to be the exception to my casual assumption that everything will be OK.
The bypass is the best bit!