Have you ever seen Memento? You know that Guy Pearce film where he has no short-term memory? Well I'm like that, only with driving!
Now you may be reading this column every week and thinking 'What is wrong with this girl?!' as my progress is certainly inconsistent. Well spare a thought for my long-suffering instructor. John and I enjoy a nice sort of uncle and niece relationship-he buys me ice cream and I tell him all about my weekend plans and my job hunting, then we discuss the state of the Boro team, and John's problems with his builders.-I mastered driving whilst having a conversation very early on in my lessons.
This is all very well, but I pay John to teach me to drive, which he has done, and continues to do patiently and with lots of encouragement. But like all good mentors he wants to see his pupil move on. He has taught me all he can, now I've got to remember what I've learnt and apply it.
I can reverse park, reverse round a corner, do a hill start and a three-point turn, and my general driving is mostly fine.
The problem is I know I can do these things, but I don't always do them properly. I am inconsistent, and I forget how I've just executed whichever manoeuvre I'm performing.
I think it is rather like my grasp of maths. I have a pretty good brain, I'm actually quite intelligent, despite appearances, but have a tendency to make things more complicated than they are, or simply to assume I'm doing something wrong simply because I can do it. At school it was usually maths, or science, and now it is those pesky manoeuvres.
-At this point I just thought I'd share with you that despite my frequent use of the word 'manoeuvres' I have never spelt it right without using the spell check! -Some things just do not stick.
And this is my point, I have to make my manoeuvres stick, because I do actually know how to do them, I just have to concentrate and trust that I know what I'm doing.
First published on http://www.gazettelive.co.uk/gazette-communities/ts5-acklam-and-linthorpe/ on 8/8/07
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