I’m going to say that like learning languages and dancing, a lack of driving talent is probably innate. It’s taken four years to overcome that natural inability and the first one was almost entirely spent battling my complete lack of knowledge about cars or how to move them in a forwardly direction.
“No, no” my instructor would patiently explain ‘No, you can’t enter the right hand lane here - because this isn’t a duel carriage way. That’s not a lane over there, that’s just the other side of the road.’ or ‘No, no, what you are doing there is you’re trying to find your bite point with the brake. Just - move right a bit - yes, there we go.’
The confusion I had between the accelerator and the brake. That should have been the warning sign. I should have stopped then.
Another additional and really quite pronounced problem was the fact that driving itself is fantastically boring but that my driving instructor was one of the most incredibly entertaining and interesting people I've met.
She would start almost every conversation we had with the words “I think I’ve told you but -” and what would follow was something that no one could have possibly told me, ever. As in...
“I think I’ve told you but I’m training my cat to use the human toilet, she’s up to ‘the amber stage’”
or
“I think I’ve told you but sometimes I get these migraines and unless I take painkillers and lie down immediately one side of my body goes completely limp.”
or
“I think I’ve told you but my sister works on one of those soft erotica phone-in channels on TV, sometimes I tune in to see what she’s up to.”
I’m not saying that these conversational gambits directly effected my ability to focus on the road, but I’m not sure, looking back, that they enhanced it.
We spent about three months trying to put our collective finger on why, as a fully functioning adult tasks like ‘keeping the car in the centre of the road’ and ‘judging relative distances’ were so beyond me, before one day she turned and declared...
“I’ve been watching you and think I finally know what’s wrong!”
“Yes?” I said, trying to ignore how much this sounded like a psychiatric assessment.
“You love to pog, you love a good pog you do!”
“I... what?”
“You know pog, to pog, like - staring. You just stare at things we pass, people, dogs, anything that isn’t the road really.”
Apparently this is common slang ‘down my way’ but I had literally never heard it before in my life.
To pog. It sounded obscene.
It would probably have been easier to curb my pogging habit if the driving instructor herself hadn’t frequently drawn my attention to things she felt were ‘pog-worthy’.
“Look!” she would cry suddenly as we practiced maneuvoures “Look! it’s that homeless man who dances at traffic lights!”
“Who?”
“Don’t you know him? He’s a local hero. Someone made him a facebook page and everything. He wanders around the Medway Towns and when he comes to traffic lights, or level crossings - he jives!”
Or...
“Look! That woman has a pram - but instead of a baby she’s strapped a melon into it!”
Or...
“Look! It’s that plumbers van that has a toilet with the face of Hitler on the side!”
We devoted some considerable time to this one. Any actual driving fell by the wayside as we tried to unriddle it. Why was the plumbers logo a toilet with the face of Hitler and was it pro- or anti-Nazi for a start. Because on the one hand you are equating Hitler with a toilet, quite a negative sentiment. But on the other hand - why bring the fuhrer in to your signage at all?
In the end we decided it was a clever marketing ploy designed to draw subconscious parallels and that all over the local area families were sitting down and saying...
“You know darling, ever since I saw that toilet with the face of Hitler I have been thinking about our own toilet and the almost dictatorial control it exercises over our family! What do you say I call that visionary young plumber and we can finally put our toilet in its place?”
“Yeah a peoples revolution!”
“I’ll phone him now and pay up front.”
Between the Hitler toilet, the dancing vagrant men, and the amount that my gay driving instructor would point at straight couples on the street and satirically mutter...
“Dis-gusting, I don’t mind them doing it in there own homes, but this is in public!”
... it was an uphill struggle. Imagine having your attention drawn one by one to each these things, and then told ‘Right, now, don’t focus on any of that curb-side freak show, nor any of the bizarre and brilliant things I'm telling you. Instead just focus on boring old driving - but don’t actually focus on driving, otherwise you’ll crash!’.
This was the other big lesson, to focus consciously on any one part of driving (ie. checking mirrors, which I would frequently attend to above all else, staring deeply and interminably into them as if in the midsts of some dreadful existential crisis) was and is a recipe for disaster. Instead you had to 'focus completely on driving, but not focus on it at all'.
This advice was imparted to me as if it were a very simple technique and not at all the sort of thing that people spend years in the Himalayas with monks learning how to do.
It took a further 24 months before I was forcibly blinkered enough to drive without getting distracted either by external sources or the constituent parts of the driving process itself.
My test seemed to have been tailored to assess just this. I don’t know if my instructor made some sort of sign to the examiner - gave her the hand signal for ‘this one’s a pogger’ but everything the examiner did seemed designed to draw my brittle attention from the road and towards her. For one thing she looked identical, and I mean identical, to Caroline Quentin.
‘Are you actually Caroline Quentin?’ I hissed mentally as she got in to the car, and every so often I'd glance at her ‘Maybe this is research for a role, maybe something dreadful has happened to Caroline Quentin and this is what she does on the weekends now.” This sounds like I was looking for distractions but it was actually uncanny.
Secondly, she added things to herself as we went round the route. It was a warm, overcast day, but about half way round she put on a jacket, then a while later a silk scarf, and then bafflingly a large pair of sunglasses - Bono-like in their inconspicuousness. I could almost see her thinking ‘Ok, that’s the extra layers on, and the distraction sunglasses - no, she is still focusing on the road. Right! It's time for the fez!”
I let these things wash over me and passed (I should point out this was the fourth time I'd taken the test, I don't want you getting any false ideas).
There was a great sense of mourning in the period immediately following the test. The tiny period of time in which I was a good driver. I'd been given the gift of driving but horribly deprived of the ability to stare at the world. The prospect of everything I was missing haunted me. This was worse when friends were in the car. ‘Nuns!’ they would cry declamatorily, pointing just outside of my field of vision, as I focused on not focusing too much on anything, and wept inwardly.
As time went by though, this began to slip, little by little I started noticing the nuns, the unicyclist, the person riding pillion on someone else's mobility scooter, the dancing vagrant man... again, who once you’ve become aware of his existence is actually very hard to miss. He covers a lot of ground. This was great news for me, though ultimately bad news for the person I recently collided with.
In my defence - it wasn’t just a case of staring at some oddity and ploughing into the back of him. We were at traffic lights. He broke suddenly, and in accordance with general principles I too broke suddenly. The difference between us was that I had a book on screenwriting on the back shelf of my car which flew under my chair and came to rest near the peddles.
What I should have done, looking back, was keep looking ahead of me and use my handbrake to stop.
What I did was look down, worried that it would lodge under the foot brake, and just stare at the book in panic.
I love a good pog.
The heavily be-eyebrowed face of the authour Robert McKee pogged back up at me, I tried to shove it away from the break peddle with my foot. I looked up. In the brief seconds available to me before I made contact my years of training unravelled and when I looked down again I focused consciously on driving, desperately trying to remember which of the two peddles I needed to press to stop this situation.
Brake... accelerator... brake... they looked so similar.
In the end I plumped for the right one, but by that point I'd spent so long focusing on them that it had very little effect and I rear-ended him anyway.
To be honest, I'm surprised I lasted as long as I did. I've basically been on borrowed time since the start. And while rear-ending someone because a book got jammed near your pedals could potentially happen to anyone, it's definitely a blessing that "are you a pogger?" is conspicuously absent as a tickbox on these insurance forms.
