I got busted a few weeks ago for speeding.
When the camera flashed, I was going 6mph over the 30mph limit. Empty road. Middle of the night. No one on the road apart from me, and the dead hooker in the boot... I was furious.
Still, I was given a choice: take a £60 fine and 3 points on the licence, or pay £95, avoid the points and just pitch up to a Speed Awareness Workshop. One course and that's it.
It felt like a get-out so I pitched up to my Workshop this evening and walked straight into a surreal scene in the reception area. It was like a setpiece from a film. Twelve strangers in a waiting room, from all walks of life, but all guilty of the same crime. And all the stereotypes were there: an angry, young black man, a distinguished, silver-haired businessman, a timid-looking Sikh, a busty airhead, a biker, a student, and various other caricatures. A butler, a ballerina, a clown... I found a chair and sat there staring out of the window, smirking. I half-expected the lights to go out for a few seconds then, when they returned, a dead body on the floor. No one knows who did it... but we're going to find out.
My reverie was broken when the trainer, a cocksure little fellow who looked like he knew all about speed, having shovelled some up his nose a moment earlier, walked out and announced, in that horribly cocky manner that only policemen can affect, that training was about to begin. Boys and girls. The weird thing was, he wasn't a policeman at all. He had just spent so long in their presence, and was clearly so in thrall to their authority, that he had taken on their mannerisms. He had all the zeal of an Army Reservist, turned down for active service because he had blown off a few of his fingers making a bomb in his shed.
Anyway, when Mad Rambo wasn't talking at us, about the great job the Boys In Blue were doing, the modular-based session consisted of carrying out motoring exercises on a computer. We were told from the outset that we wouldn't be judged on our scores which is just as well because I was complete shit at them. One involved spotting potential hazards on the road and I managed to go through the entire test without seeing a single one. I think I was just expecting to see some explosions and falling trees or something. Not people crossing the road.
But I was never going to learn anything of note anyway. The tutor just wouldn't shut up long enough for questions.
Actually, I'll tell you what I learnt: I learnt that 80% of pedestrians survive a collision at 30mph and this drops to 10% at 40mph. This was borne out, apparently, by a video that showed a car braking at 40mph but still hitting a dummy pedestrain, some 10ft away, at 26mph. But what's that then? A collision at 40mph or a collision at 26mph? And if the latter, wouldn't it be okay to actually travel at a higher speed than the original starting point of 40mph if it would see a collision, after braking, at 30mph?
Unfortunately, I never got to ask Mad Rambo but it didn't matter, he didn't know the fucking answer anyway.
