Life from the tank

Anyone within 25 miles of Brum might like to head for the hills (or away from the hills if more appropriate!). It happened at last. This morning some mad fool collected me from my place of residence and carted me off to a lesser known area of Brum affectionately referred to as 'the nursery'! It was there that said hero attempted to acquaint me with the workings of a contraption known as an automobile. Indeed he was brave relinquishing control of that much metal into my shaking hands.

Gears - now them I understand, biting points...well getting there. I think when it comes to how well I was doing on the steering versus clutch control stakes I can summarise with his best quotation so far "Don't worry about that lorry (!!) worry about your clutch!". Pre empting large things attempting to turn you into a pancake is not as important as releasing the clutch pedal apparantly!

Things I had problems with ...

Many and various, it being day 1 but... mostly believing him when he said he wouldn't let me crash, checking everything myself (instead of believing him and to the detriment of my steering/speed etc) and getting the hand of the indicators. They are simple things but up for right and down for left is apparantly counter instinctive for me...

Ah well. No near misses, no crashes, nobody beeping at me. No running into buses who braked sharply and my instructor telling me that it had all gone smoothly and my lesson had been most straightforward! Ah well - he'll learn. How the hell you develop the coordination skills to do all of that and go backwards... I hope I am soon to find out. Parking is to me now an arcane mystery!

More to follow on monday... and again on friday. Two lessons a week. I'm really looking forward to becoming au fait with it all. I can't believe someone is letting me do it... let alone 17 year old boys! What I didn't tell him was that I knew about accelerating out of corners from playing too many racing games on consoles!

Apparantly I have picked up useful things by osmosis. All those years of being a passenger.