I had my driving lesson last night.<\/p>\n
It was pretty fun. The instructor was a good one, friendly and encouraging but also critical. He drove me across town to a quiet residential “proving ground” where I drove around doing lots of left turns followed by lots of right turns, then basically just drove around getting exposure to as many types of road as possible. I had to do lots of “peek and creep”, as he called it, driving. Up and down hill and stuff. I got him to run me through all the manoeuvres that you have to do in the test. Apparently I probably wouldn’t pass the current driving test but it wouldn’t take much to get me there. They’ve changed some of the guidelines now. You have to block change when approaching a junction, which is silly IMHO. “Breaks slow you down, gears speed you up” apparently. He wasn’t bothered about me getting all that right, though. Apparently you don’t know what gear you will need. In my opinion, you might not know<\/strong>, exactly, by you probably have a good idea. There are other things which I can’t remember. He was very complimentary of my awareness and observation, which was nice. He mentioned it a number of times. I guess it’s partly because I’ve been making an effort to improve it and partly inherent as a biker. If you’re on a bike, you do all you can to avoid hitting anyone\/anything. The effects are much more serious than as a car driver.<\/p>\n I told him why I was doing it, and he told me that he had quite a bit of experience driving vans of various types. So throughout the lesson he gave me pointers on what I might do differently if I was in whacking great Transit, rather than in a little Fiesta.<\/p>\n All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed it and I’m now quite looking forward to Saturday.<\/p>\n In other driving news, I’m enquiring about training as a bus driver. Might sound a bit random, but I need to earn some extra money next year, and I’d rather do something unusual than sit behind a bar or a checkout. A lot of the bus companies will pay for training\/qualification for the PCV licence and it would be another thing to have on my CV, as well as being able to drive minibuses and the like. I’ve contacted a couple of places in Birmingham, and one has replied and sent me an application pack, which is reasonably positive. Remains to be seen whether it’s realistic, but it could be fun. All of this interest in driving is with a possible view to becoming a driving instructor. I’m not sure IT is the right place for me. I’m going to focus on learning about security and networking in my final year, to make myself more employable, but I don’t think that long-term I’ll stay in IT.<\/p>\n I’m thinking that I might train as a driving instructor when I can afford it, and then try and do that at the same time as trying to get some business\/management qualifications so that by the time Hannah’s all qualified and at a level to be a partner, we can set up a practice and I can be practice manager.<\/p>\n That’s the master-plan, it remains to be seen how realistic it is. I’ve just had enough of sitting in front of a computer all day, every day and want a bit more control over my own destiny, to make it sound grand. Ho hum.<\/p>\n Hannah’s been sent home from work, feeling really poorly, so I’m going to go and pick her up from the station and have lunch with her. Hope she feels better soon \ud83d\ude41<\/p>\n I had my driving lesson last night. It was pretty fun. The instructor was a good one, friendly and encouraging but also critical. He drove me across town to a quiet residential “proving ground” where I drove around doing lots of left turns followed by lots of right turns, then basically just drove around getting\u2026 Read More »<\/a><\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-25","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s9qMPF-driving","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wrigley.me.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wrigley.me.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wrigley.me.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrigley.me.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrigley.me.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=25"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrigley.me.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/25\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wrigley.me.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=25"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrigley.me.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=25"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wrigley.me.uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=25"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}