Goddamn it! I have a grading at Taekwondo tomorrow so I went to my club last night to get in some much needed practise. I found, by chance, something of a short cut on the way there. On the return journey I was knackered (it’s a 6-2 week and it was about ten at night), stressing about my grading tomorrow, looking for the new found short cut, and though I saw the speed camera I just didn’t register it until I suddenly had FLASH! FLASH! in my mirror. Bloody, bloody hell! I was reading that new drivers now have a probationary period of two years on their license, within which time amassing six points or above automatically leads to disqualification. From what I can gather it is new drivers per se. I became a driver (well, rider) back in ’85, and passed my car test in ’05, so I’m hoping one of those will be the one that it is reckoned from. I only passed my class II in January though (gulp) and am still striving for my artic license. If I can’t get a job for the three years that (I think) the points stay on my license I am going to be gutted. If they take away my HGV license (and I’ve wasted the worst part of five grand) I am going to be suicidal. This time tomorrow the grading will be over and I’ll be a lot less stressed. Then I can work up to a new fever of stresed-ness for my next test, then sit around waiting to see if I have picked up the points and the fines and how that will bugger my job prospects. I have no idea how long the fines take to come through, so I’ll be on tender hooks whenever the post arrives, for as long as it takes. Balls! Buck. 🙁 PS, Day after, done my grading. I made one embarrassing mistake. Grand Master Loh (the head of the whole of the U.K., eighth dan, so, no pressure) told me to go into sitting stance with a punch. Those were not his exact words (his accent makes understanding him difficult, and I flap under pressure so I’m not sure exactly what he did say) but instead of widening my stance and dropping down a little, I stepped back into a fighting stance. I knew I’d done something wrong but couldn’t think what I should be doing. Sah bum nim Caroline (who was standing next to Grand master Loh at the front of the hall) had to say it again and do it herself before I got over my flap and carried on. Also I went down onto my knuckles for press-ups, but had my hands in a vertical plane not the horizontal. Like my knuckles cared. Hey ho, done now for another few months. Seventeenth of October to be precise. Hopefully I will have passed. My poomse (kata in Karate; a sequence of set moves) was right, and showed […]
Continue readingAuthor: Buck
Socialising my arse!
Hi, We have just returned from Wendy’s sister’s (Gail). That was eventful. Wendy’s brother and his wife (Peter and Emma) came with us in the mighty Micra to the outskirts of Brum. Some people claim that Daventry, being a further fifty miles down the country, is not actually in Birmingham. To these geographical pedants we merely say: well you’re not going to admit you live in Brum, are you? So, first the journey there. Four of us in the Micra. It’s only a 1000cc engine, with 90,000 miles on the clock, no air conditioning, the mechanism on one of the windows is knackered and it was a mad hot day. A recipe for joy in that simple description. Also, unbeknownst to us when we arranged it, we had chosen to go on the same weekend they were hosting the flower show at Birmingham NEC, which was plugged ceaselessly on (may I say in passing, the best for a long time) Gardeners World the night before. When we finally got clear of the weirdness of the jams (come to a complete stop, then speed up to.., seventy miles an hour, m’lud. Yet at no point did we come across a cause for the stopping.) obviously I put the Micra into the sports setting (I shut the drivers door window) and went for it. You’ll believe a Micra can fly. That was a relief. Then they closed the road, sending us on a huge diversion that left us in the middle of nowhere. The Bullring is lovely at this time of year so we whiled away the time waiting for Gail to send her beau to come and find us. When we got there there were all the usual antics of family get-togethers; the beer, the small talk to partners you don’t know, the herds of kids, etc. It went quite well (there were no fights, nobody died, we are all still talking to each other) and Gail, bless her, pulled out all the stops to accommodate us, and trying to make bbq food for a veggie is, to be honest, about as far as sanity and civility can be pushed. But you know how it is, you want your own bed and a complete absence of noise, social interaction and children. (Or is that just me?) To be fair, Gail’s young ‘un, Brett, was fine, a sterling youth. I expect the others were, individually, upstanding pillars of juvenile rectitude, but en masse they blend into a mob, one video game short of barbarity, anarchy and possibly cannibalism. (Again, it is possible that that is just my non-paternal impression.) We made it, none the less. Also it strikes me; perchance I should adopt a personal pronoun (to avoid erroneous inference being drawn from my ramblings.) Me. myself, and I. In other news, I am back on the pick now. I have my rota (every other weekend off, woo-hoo!) and am achieving my pick figure without any problems. If I can just stay […]
Continue readingDriving test
Guess what? I failed. Again. 🙁 Damn and blast! It was even the same route I took last test, I came up to that same painted island, though ‘HA!! I’ll have you this time.’ Then as I went into it, started to steer around it! How stupid am I? I knew what was coming, was prepared for it, and still did the reflex thing. I mounted the pavement with my trailer wheel, hit myself in the head quite hard, and called myself a fucking stupid prick. Which, is not quite the right approach. You are told to be casual about mistakes and hope the examiner has not noticed. I feel he may have noticed that one. After that I went to pieces a bit. I made two other (serious) mistakes. I tried to drive through a filter light when the (right turn) green arrow had gone off. I failed my rigid test on the same thing, and swore I’d never get caught out by that again. I stopped the truck, but was sure one of my instructors had said you could carry on if the arrow went off, so started off again. STOP! Red light. (Turns out I was getting confused. The instance when you can proceed, is when the filter light goes out, but the lights are still on green. In this instance the green was for straight ahead, the right turn arrow had it’s own red light which was telling all who are not muppets not to try to turn right. Now it makes sense. Better too late than never.) The other mistake was my perennial problem: oncoming vehicle, parked car on my side, fag papers clearance, carried on confidently. Bad Buck! No biker heroics allowed. If there is less than a doors width slow to a crawl, or as the examiner said; ‘I would have held back there.’ So, three stupid fail marks, all of which I have failed on before. Unbelievable. The positives are; the other bit where I failed on that route last time I passed with flying colours. Took both lanes, made it easy for myself, and easily got through the turn. After that I got a tast for hogging both lanes and the tight turns suddenly became very do-able. So, I have to slow it right down approaching every situation and not be a dickhead. I just need someone of a nagging and nervous disposition to shout at me every time it looks like I’m about to kill myself and all of those around me. I don’t think Wendy is allowed on my test though. In other news, I have been kicked out of de-kit now. I am back to being a picker (in grocery/ ambient so far) which is OK by me. I’ve only done two half days and one full day (yesterday) and already I’ve noticed they are giving out the good picks to a select few so the rest of the lads have to struggle to get there target. There […]
Continue readingJolly hols/ honeymoon
Hi, we made it! All the way to Inverness, within spitting distance of the famous Loch Ness. Yeah verily, it rocked! The journey wasn’t too much fun, the poor little Micra being thrashed mercilessly for seven or so hours each way. Two hundred and forty miles of toe-down motorway, then another one hundred and thirty three miles of (actually very good, fast, and challenging) ‘A’ roads. Poor little Micra. Some of those hills go on forever. We had been warned previously, so I was able to…, make sure I was maintaining my usual law abiding progress, but there were two cops on the motorway bridges, and a third in one of those ambush vans when we hit Scotland. The roads get empty, there is nothing and no-one for you to hit, and coppers everywhere. Go figure, as the colonials would have it. That aside, the drive into Scotland was grand in every sense of the word. It’s so BIG! Massive countryside and it just keeps on coming. The roads are a bikers dream. Even in the mighty Micra they were superb. Get around there on a Japanese pocket rocket…wow! You wouldn’t even have to kill yourself, the roads are so good. Enough rhapsodising about the application of Mr Mc Adams finest. We arrived more or less on time, having barely got lost, but couldn’t at first find the caravan. We rang Bonnie (the owner, nice person) up and found we had gone past it. We were relieved and gutted in equal measure. We had just (after driving for three hundred and seventy seven miles) realised I hadn’t checked to see if was just an internet scam. That would have been irksome. It looked to be genuine so we were relieved, but we had just passed a shabby, ill used caravan so we were at best apprehensive. When we retraced our route Bonnie was stood outside and directed us in. The caravan was hidden around the back, completely screened by trees on all sides, and in a large field on its own. Joy! The caravan was lovely, the setting idyllic, the vista picturesque. Splendid. We just chilled that evening, knackered as we were from the travelling. Later on I was waiting for it to get properly dark so we could see the stars. There were no street lights and no urban pollution so I thought I would get an unparalled view. Half ten and it was dusk, eleven, still dusk, twenty to twelve and you could still read a book in the light that was left! I gave up and went to bed. Land of the midnight sun! We decided to go out to see Loch Ness and Urqhart castle the next day. I went searching high and low and couldn’t find my camera. I found the spare batteries, the battery charger, but no bloody camera, and I’d just bought a memory card specifically for this holiday. Bastard. Not to let it mar the holiday we went and did the tourist […]
Continue readingDamn the DSA and all who sail on her!
Balls! Failed again. Happily I thrive on despair and disappointment. The worst thing is; both of the incidents that lead to the fail were avoidable. One of them was trying to steer around one of those painted white traffic islands (in a truck they are usually impossible, you make a token effort to show you’ve seen it then run it over anyway) which meant I mounted a pavement. The other incident was two fails in one, I came up to a set of traffic lights. At the lights the road split in a Y with a little dividing island between the diverging lanes. As I approached I saw the left turn was going to be tight and considered taking the right lane as well. That had a line of traffic in it so I thought, what the hell, I can make it. Which left me an almost impossibly tight turn. So I was inching forward, getting as close as I possibly could to the dividing island, then looking back to check I was going to clear the pavement with my trailer. Inch forward, check front and mirrors, inch forward, "STOP!" The bastard lights had changed to red! D’oh! Then, when I set off, because of the position I’d left myself in, I nearly took out a railing. In the de-brief the examiner said, apart from running the lights, everything was down to approaching each situation too fast. If I’d have slowed down and given myself time to think… Still, those are (another) two mistakes I’ll never make again and I can learn from my mistakes, I should be running out of mistakes to make soon! Ho hum, tired Bucky. Later, Buck. 🙁
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