I’ll admit there have been times where I wish I’d done it sooner. Hitchhiking next to a shovel in the back of a Scottish pickup truck. Perilous missions along Spanish motorways, hot carton of Don Simon vinto tinto in hand. And British trains. They all come to mind.
But then, in some ways, I am quite glad I waited until I was 27 to learn to drive. Journalists like to bear witness, and the system has reached its lowest ebb since mandatory driving tests were first introduced in 1935. As it stands, the average waiting time for a test in London is 22 weeks. In 2015 that was around eight weeks. Some say it was even less before.
This Covid-induced mess slows down the economy, blocking workers from getting the jobs they want. It also puts more financial strain on learners who will continue paying for lessons long after they have reached test standard. And it creates a pressured environment that is ripe for exploitation. The DVSA knows this too, because it’s currently consulting on changes that are clearly intended to design out profiteering.
Around a month ago the DVSA sent me an email asking if I thought they should change the booking system to a one-learner one-test model. I howled ‘YES’. At the moment an Approved Driving Instructor (ADI) can book lessons on behalf of students before they become available to learners. Surprise surprise, the bent instructors block book them (it is suspected with bots) then profit by flogging them to students at ridiculous prices. One of my instructors was involved in this, I am sure.
You might notice the plural there, because I had four instructors. If I were to give them Disney inspired names, they would be Angry, Dodgy, Tardy, and Steve. Only Steve retains his real name because he’s the only one I don’t intend to defame.
‘I raised my voice’
It all started in February when my mother-in-law took me seal-watching in Norfolk. We drove there under spotless blue skies, enveloped in the frost white foliage either side of the carriageways. In London I was feeling oppressed by the pace of it all. In Norfolk the seals reminded me that flopping around like a hairy slug is okay. We couldn’t have done it without a car though, so I booked my theory test the same night.
The Internet said the best way to pass was downloading the official DVSA app, so I quickly became more addicted to my phone. Answering hundreds of questions, playing the hazard perception games, staring at traffic symbols, I did it all. After the test I even gave my shopkeeper a pep talk when I noticed him sweating over a national speed limit sign.
With my theory in the bag, I found a local Grade A instructor using the DVSA’s list of phone numbers. Things started well enough. I learned the basic controls and he had me doing laps of Thornhill Crescent, a square in Islington bounded by multi-million pound Victorian terraces. But soon the thrill of the early lessons turned into regular stomach knots; it felt like I couldn’t do anything right.
I can’t really fault anything Angry taught me. I think he was the least likely to be prosecuted for breaking the Highway Code. He was, however, by far the most likely to be convicted of murdering a cyclist, and, as I will explain, his mix of real-time pedantry and simmering anger created a lot of unnecessary stress which only became apparent once I moved on to another instructor.
After a few incidents where he turned bright red, told me I was affecting his blood pressure, then recommended I try a quack anxiety medicine called Rescue Remedy, I decided it might be time to move on.
The final nail in the coffin came when Angry made a bizarre performance of rolling the window down to scream madly at a Deliveroo who had just undertaken us without any lights. They were long out of earshot, unlike me who took the brunt of his expulsion. This happened twice in one lesson. While the cyclists were dangerous, I found Angry’s reaction much more distracting than anything that had happened outside the car.
In his four paragraph reply to my dismissal message he denied screaming (‘I raised my voice’) and argued: “If I made them reflect on their actions maybe it will stop them from doing it to other motorists and potentially having an accident in the future.”
I would later learn that Angry was furious about Low Traffic Neighbourhoods, and wrote to his local newspaper questioning if the environmental scheme was the road to Nazism. I should have known he was mad. Angry drooled every time he mentioned the words Sadiq and Khan, and was obsessed with the learning and driving abilities of pregnant women (he repeatedly claimed having a baby-on-board makes them overly anxious).
‘Don’t do that in your test’
So then I moved on to Dodgy, who had a very different approach to Angry. After 16 hours of listening to Angry smack his lips every time he gave a direction, Dodgy took me onto the mean streets of Stratford in rush hour and just said: “Drive.” It was a steep learning curve, but it turned out a bit of trust did more for my confidence than Angry’s red-faced hollering and compulsive wheel-snatching.
There was a catch though. It turned out smooth-talking gum-chewing Dodgy actually wanted to meet another four miles away in Barking, was habitually late, and appeared to be working a second job from his laptop as I powered around East London. After one lesson where he left me waiting around for 10 minutes, he was bold enough to include me in his copy paste message reminding pupils of his lateness policy.
Still, I enjoyed Dodgy on a human level. He was full of nostalgia about playing outside in the 90s, and had a humorous approach to calling out my mistakes. He never called me an idiot, but I would have been okay with it.
He was Dodgy for a reason though. A few weeks into our relationship, he tried to sell me a test, informing me I could swap my test to Goodmayes test centre for the small fee of £300. It only costs £62 to book a test through the DVSA.
Another time, Dodgy clearly forgot we had a lesson, turned up 15 minutes late and then asked me to sit in the passenger seat so we could take his daughter to school. On the way to his house, he made a phone call with his hands and did a fair amount of speeding. “Don’t do that in your test,” he told me after.
By way of apology, Dodgy brought me a bag of dates he’d purchased in Mecca while on his Hajj pilgrimage. They were a delicious, caramelicious bribe, but I had to sack him when he announced it would cost £250 to use his car for the test, way above the price he usually charged by the hour.
Dodgy actually laundered this information into our lesson via a morality tale about a learner who refused to pay the fee and would be sitting the test in his mum’s car, presumably now destined to fail his bay parking without Dodgy’s error-prone window sticker system that teaches you how to look at stickers rather than learn to park like a normal person.
To be fair on Dodgy, when I asked him for a breakdown of the costs for his fee, he just replied: “£250”. A true businessman. Emboldened by my decision to fire Angry, I pulled the plug on Dodgy too. It was like being Alan Sugar and his chauffeur at the same time. All I needed was a Rolls Royce.
‘Making progress’
Instead I had my dad’s VW up!, my dad, and Veygo learner insurance. My dad grew up fixing and driving stuff in the 80s, long before teenagers had PlayStations and Pornhub, so I listened closely when it came to lessons in mechanical sympathy and control. Soon we were exploring North London’s country-ish lanes, ‘keeping her on the boil’, and mastering the art of avoiding next door’s Range Rover.
My two younger sisters thought the last part was particularly hilarious and filmed one especially unedifying attempt from the safety of the front room window, jeering and hollering like a pair of coked-up football hooligans while my dad pranced around the bonnet, kicking the front wheel into place as he tried to compute my incomputable decisions, no doubt questioning if I really was his son.
“Why is he revving?” my youngest sister observed. I still don’t know.
While I enjoyed John Cleese as Jeremy Clarkson’s tutelage, I was wary of his fractious relationship with local law enforcement. Not long after I told my dad about ‘making progress’, a driving instructor euphemism for putting your foot down, he was under investigation by Essex Police for speeding – an alleged crime I unwittingly witnessed while he was ‘showing me how it’s done’ on a trip to Sussex.
With the test now only weeks away, I was in a good place but I still needed some help for the home straight, and a car to sit the test in. After cold calling another dozen instructors, I found a man in Mill Hill with plenty of availability who assured me his test fee was only £90.
On reflection, ‘plenty of availability’ is never a good sign. Our first, and only, lesson was among the worst two hours of my short driving career. The new clutch he had fitted was virtually undriveable for someone of my negligible talents.
Tardy also had a habit of pointing out people of certain faiths in the street. After our lesson he told me he regularly drives at 120mph when he’s visiting his teenage daughter in the Midlands. I guess life is cheap when you are in your early 70s.
Fortunately, Tardy lived up to his name on the second lesson and failed to turn up. To be fair to him, he was happy to do the lesson, as long as I was happy to wait for two hours while he finished with another pupil. More than happy to avoid another ethnicity tour of Mill Hill, I sacked him on the spot.
‘I’m the s**t’
There is one driving instructor who I have not mentioned yet. I’ve never met him, but with nearly a million subscribers on YouTube, Richard Fanders of Conquer Driving is probably the best known instructor in the country. Every time a question popped into my head, Richard’s channel had the answer. If someone at the DVSA is reading this, I think Richard should be knighted.
Buried in Conquer Driving videos, I was still instructorless for the third time in six months. The test was only a couple of weeks away and my dad would be away from London on test day. I needed a new instructor, and fast.
In situations like these, I normally call on my aunty. So I did, via a rambling WhatsApp moan about the state of driving instructors. I was feeling emotional, so I used words like ‘crooks’ and ‘system abuse’. They aren’t all like that, but that’s how I felt at the time.
My cousin passed his test with Steve, so my aunty passed on his details. “That guy we used was nice, just a local guy, recommended to me by some friends,” she wrote. Then she added: “I think he once stopped halfway through a lesson to pee against a tree.”
I was undeterred: “Honestly that’s fine compared to what I have had to deal with. They are such a strange breed of human.”
Steve did jump out of the car to pee in the woods towards the end of our first lesson, but his apparent bladder weakness had no impact on his ability to teach. “I’m the s**t,” he told me as we pulled out of the carpark for the first time, and he was.
Zen in his feedback, confident in his Highway Code knowledge, and responsive to my questions, I was happy to pay him £45 an hour when the other instructors charged £35. Sometimes you really do get what you pay for.
Steve also had interesting things to talk about, like his dog getting neutered. He also choked on a carrot while trying to give up biscuits. Steve said this near death experience was due to a lack of concentration. It was a good fable for a learner driver.
Despite his price tag, Steve wasn’t looking for a payday. He charged me £100 for the test day, which included an hour of driving before the test and the time he would spend waiting. The night before, he decided I only needed an hour of practice when a less honest instructor might have insisted I needed two. “You’re test ready,” he kept telling me, “Just don’t f**k up.”
‘Don’t be nervous’
On the morning of the test Steve turned up with his copy of James Holland’s Normandy ‘44. I can’t remember what we talked about, but I was feeling calm by the time the stony-faced examiner summoned me over. Steve had done the job of putting me at ease.
In 90 years the fundamentals of the driving test remain unchanged. In a test explainer video filmed by Ford in 1935, Sir Malcolm Campbell begins with an enduring bit of advice for learners: “Don’t be nervous. Driving tests have one object: To make our roads safe.” Sir Malc was one of the few world land speed record holders to die a natural death, so he must have been good.
Back then, indicators were still a twinkle in some inventor’s eye. People drove around hand signalling like (some) cyclists. Unless you were turning right, flicking cigarette ash from the window could be ‘very misleading’. Driving on the wrong side of the road, looking down at the gearstick, and weaving about like a maniac – all of it was frowned upon.
I won’t bore you with the details of my test, but I passed. About halfway through the drive, I noticed the examiner’s legs relax as the tension in her braking foot disappeared. She could tell I had the chops.
It’s easy to say now, but my one piece of advice to learners is to remain sanguine about missing the mark. Whatever the DVSA does to cut down the backlog (and I hope they deal with the crooks profiting from desperation) there will always be pressure when taking the wheel. Cars are big heavy machines and drivers who break the law or fail to control them will kill.
In my day-job as a court reporter I have seen too many lives destroyed by selfish drivers. There is always something distinctly upsetting about deaths caused by dangerous driving. Often the defendants are hardly types who would go out and kill someone on purpose. Perhaps grieving family members know this. It always feels like their anguish is intensified by the preventability of it all.
I don’t envy anyone learning to drive at the moment. One colleague of mine who passed in 2021 said it felt like getting the ‘last chopper out of Saigon’. But if there’s one advantage to the current waiting list, it is that learners can spend more time practicing. I had 69 hours and got zero faults. Maybe this generation of drivers will be the safest we have ever seen.
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