Of course, it wasn’t my fault. I was coasting down from 40mph on a road I didn’t know, in a town I don’t live in.
I checked the speedo – 35mph - it wasn’t dropping as fast as I thought it would. There was a slight gradient, I dabbed the brakes a little and then there was a flash.
Three months later I was sitting in a conference room in a Hampshire hotel and the Speed Awareness Instructor was agreeing that it wasn’t my fault. There were about twenty of us on the course that day. He agreed it was none of our faults!
“It’s never our fault when we get caught speeding is it?” he said.
Ah, suddenly I could see where he was going.
I looked around the room for a speed-freak that needed re-programming; someone who arrived by jet pack, who was talking fast and had an aerodynamic haircut.
But there were no people like that on our Speed Awareness Course.
We were all first-time offenders who were carelessly close enough to the speed limit to warrant an alternative to prosecution.
None of us thought we deserved to be there.
As a group we started to compile a worst 10 consequences of speeding with one as the lowest and 10n as the highest.
We started with the Speed Awareness Course at one because no-one was quick enough to suggest ‘had a nasty scare but got home safely after a lesson well learnt’.
I was called on to contribute.
“You could lose your job...” I offered. They asked me where to rank it and I gave it nine, leaving 10 open for catastrophic outcomes.
In the discussion that followed, ‘your own death’ ended up ranked at six, while maiming and injuring others were into the sevens and eights, while another person’s death and permanent disability got the top spots.
I shrank into my chair realising I had announced myself to the room as the guy who would rather run over a stranger than lose his job.
I had expected to feel ‘in the wrong’ on the course, but not about something like that.
I felt I was there because I was a sloppy driver. I wasn’t ignoring the speed limit. I’m not even against speed cameras.
But maybe I do need to ask myself if I really understand what is important in life if I can be sloppy at the controls of a ton of speeding steel.
A Speed Awareness Course might sound like a soft option – and it is compared to prosecution – but it’s certainly not worthless.
Intrigued by ginger twist to my new tash
We are into the home straight for Movember. My moustache is changing colour. It is beginning to acquire a red-squirrel tinge that doesn’t match hair from any other part of my body.
If I wasn’t uncomfortable enough with it already, this has really taken the biscuit.
I’m not Gingerist by any means, but if I am going to be ginger anywhere I would like it to be all over.
I don’t want to look like I was stuck together as a classroom project in which different tables got to draw a different bit. I’ve never grown a moustache this far on its own before.
My face is breaking new ground. It is not just the kids who don’t notice it any more, it is everyone.
I’m realising that this means, to strangers on the street, I am now just a bloke with a funny coloured moustache.
It has become part of my identity. I don’t like it. I don’t think it likes me, but having gone to all the trouble of growing it, am I going to get rid of it when the clock strikes midnight on the last day of Movember?
Despite all my moaning I am prepared at least to give some thought to the idea of keeping it on for a little while. We’ll have to see how it gets on with the tricks I am trying to teach it.
So far, it is not a very clever moustache... Follow my Movember quest at http://mobro.co/stevescoles and Twitter.
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