Speed awareness - you ain't heard nothing yet

“I am so pissed off” said Big-J as he threw himself down onto the sofa. “would you believe I have to go on a frigging speed awareness course” he added, “and all because I was doing 37mph in a 30 mile zone. It was a trap,” he grumbled. “And I have to report to a Police station to show my license – what a waste of bloody time. I’m far too busy for all this.”

We spent the next 20 minutes or so booking the course online for which we had a privilege of paying some £90. But, we reasoned, better than 3 points on your license and a £60 fine.

Big-J spent the following week arguing with the Plod about the unfairness of having to leave his driving license with them for the requisite 6 weeks. He needed it before then as we were shortly to be renting a car overseas. He took some informal legal advice which was basically – get a life. Eventually, a way around it was found (the Police retained the license for 48 hours) without my man having to resort to the legal action he was about to threaten, whatever that may have been. Good idea, I thought, to take on the might of the Met over a housekeeping matter.

The day of the Speed Awareness course arrived amid much moaning and groaning: “I’m just too busy to spend a whole morning do this…” “I’ve been driving for over 40 years, why do I need to go on a course …?” “How long will it take me to get to Ealing,,,” “Where am I going to park?” And so on, and so on, ad naseum.

He left home at 7.45h arriving just the 45 minutes early. Glass ever half full, he called me from a local Ealing café to describe the delicious breakfast he was eating.

At around 13.00h, when the course finished, he called me from the car.
“How was it?” I asked, sympathetically.
“It was AMAZING!” he replied. “What a brilliant lecturer!" He warmed to his theme. "I can’t believe how he held our attention for four hours! I learned so much, it was fantastic! Everyone should do it. It’s shame that you can’t do it voluntarily, I thoroughly recommend it.” A total volte-face, as is so often his wont.

That was the really the last I heard of it until some days later when I next got into the car with Big-J driving. We’d been going no distance at all before he asked me, “Do you know why there are speed bumps in some roads and not in others? No? Well, I’ll tell you. They’re not allowed to put bumps on major routes where they might impede the progress of ambulances.”
“Oh, I said, "interesting. I’d never have thought of that.”
“No” he said, “well you wouldn’t, you haven’t been on a speed awareness course like me; and come on, guess how many fatalities – as a percentage of all UK road fatalities – there are on motorways every year. Go on, go on - guess.”
“It must be quite small I suppose,” I said hesitantly. “Around 20%?”
“Aah no” said my speed aware husband, “far, far less. It’s 3%” he said triumphantly, “because most fatalities are in urban areas and involve pedestrians. There aren’t a lot of pedestrians on motorways.”

We drove on a little further.

“You see that big 50 mph sign?” he said, “that’s because it’s the ‘gateway’ to the 50mph zone. The 50mph signs along the road after that are much smaller. I’ll bet you never knew that did you?”
I had to admit that this was a fact I hadn’t known until that moment.
“And...” he added, “when you see one of those white circle signs with a black diagonal line across it, what do you think that means then?”
“I think it means that you’re out of the previous speed limit zone,” I said.
“Yes, yes it does” he said excitedly, “but what speed does it mean that you can do?”
“Er, 70” I mumbled.
“That’s where you’re wrong” he smugly replied. “The maximum speed limit varies depending upon whether you’re on a motorway, a dual carriage-way or another sort of road. The national speed limit isn’t 70mph you know. You really need to know what sort of a road you’re on and what the speed limit in that area is. It’s very important.”

By now, I was getting a Walter Meldrew, One Foot in the Grave sort of headache. Visions of having to live the rest of my life against this barrage of driving information was making me feel somewhat bilious not to mention very irritated.
“I could explain to you why the urban speed limit is generally set at 30mph if you like” he said.
“On go on do, that’d be really fascinating” I replied, lacing my answer with sarcasm in an attempt to stop him in his tracks. Totally lost on him.

“OK then, it’s because when you drive at 30mph, your car is moving at 13 metres per second and the length of a bus is 13 metres - ah ha!” he exclaimed, “so what does that mean?”

“I guess that means that if you’re overtaking a bus and someone walks out in front of it, theoretically, you’ll have time to brake,” said I.
“Yes, exactly! Well done you!” he replied.

I had to think of a way of stopping this before it really took hold.

“I’d really love to hear your new Bob Dylan album, have you got it loaded?" I said.
“Really?” said Big-J, “you’re not usually that keen to listen to Bob, you usually like to chat whilst we’re in the car.”
“Yes” I said, “I usually do.”

Mugging. It's an everyday thing.

It seems shocking to me but our children accept 'muggings' as an everyday thing.  Ask any group of fourteen year old boys and they'll tell you they expect it. Nothing to get excited about or lose sleep over.

So it was that one balmy summer's Saturday evening my phone rang at around 9.15pm.  A fellow mother said: "Ben's OK but he's here and you need to come and collect him".  She explained that a group of seven of our fifteen year old children had been attacked whilst walking across a London park.  

I raced around there and charged in to find all seven in her living room with mine (only mine) covered in blood from his dripping and very swollen nose.  He seemed quite cheerful and stable but then, he's always been a laid back kid.  One of the other parents, a doctor, after checking him over advised us to take him to hospital.  She thought his nose may be broken.

So what had happened and why had my son come off so badly?  Our children had been walking to a friend's house where a party was due to have been happening but then wasn't, due to the fluidity and scattyness of teenage arrangements.  They decided to walk back to one of their houses.  It was summer, it was light and they were in a large group.  Turning a corner, they were set upon by a gang of four or five "seven foot tall nineteen year olds" who promptly singled mine out from the edge of the group, knocking him to ground.  Making the mistake of struggling back to his feet, he was knocked down again but this time, for good measure, they kicked him hard about the head and face.  By now, the girls were screaming and the other boys were unable to do much as they were outnumbered, out-muscled and frankly, scared out of their wits.

Fortunately, after a while, our children were able to run away and take refuge in a local Chinese take-away.  During the fifteen minutes it took for the Police to arrive, their tormentors loitered threateningly outside in a further effort to intimidate and terrify. Unsurprisingly, they scarpered when the plod arrived.  Although the Police took the incident seriously, taking statements and later calling us in to look through mug shots, no-one was ever apprehended. And what of these young criminals?  Do they have parents? One policeman confided to me that many parents he meets aren't averse to giving their kids a good old thrashing; not actually for committing the crime but for being stupid enough to get caught.

Meanwhile, I had an adverse reaction.  I couldn't sleep for weeks, I lost my appetite (believe me, a real sign of stress) and I was spontaneously bursting into tears all over the place.  I felt profoundly disturbed by the wanton violence meted out for no reason.  They weren't even after money or mobiles, they just wanted to kick someone's head in for the hell of it.

They had indeed succeeded in breaking Ben's nose which meant surgery followed by weeks of a Hannibal Lecter style plaster case attached to his face by long strips of plaster.  Travelling to and from school on the tube became the bane of his life.

Waiting anxiously for a delayed reaction from him, I decided to call Victim Support who suggested that I get Ben to call them to talk things through.  He looked at me as though I was mildly insane.  "Look Mum" he said, "I was attacked, I've had my nose broken and there's nothing I can do to change that.  I'm just not going to let it ruin my life!"  And that was that, he didn't want to delve any deeper.  Surely he should have been traumatised whereas I should have done the soothing it'll- be-all-right-let-me-kiss-it-better mummy thing?  What could be the explanation for our polarised approaches?

Well, back in the golden olden days of the 1960's and 1970's when we were growing up, as long as you steered clear of skin-heads, muggings (or to give them their proper label - serious assaults with or without GBH) were abnormal.  We feared them, we worried about them.  They were unusual, terrible and they often made local or national news.  Now that they're two a penny, they have insidiously filtered into the fabric of our kids' everyday lives. Episodes that were so awful, so dreadful in our day have, empirically, become simply another routine hazard in theirs.

Our normal, law abiding, young boy teenagers are a soft target for thugs and there's clearly not too much safety in numbers.  What a horrifying indictment of liberalisation that our kids all expect to experience assault at some stage - particularly the boys.  Instinctively shrugging it off, they put it down to experience whilst our own childhood conditioning makes their laissez-faire acceptance of this current phenomenon hard to grasp.  Even more alarming, let's project forward twenty or thirty years when our grandchildren are out on a Saturday night.  What will the natural order be by then?  Full body armour and a bouncer on hand?  Today we are witnessing a terrifying rise in London's gun and knife crime which bucks the trend of other decreasing crime statistics but we seem powerless to thwart it.

This was my son's third mugging experience.  During the previous two less violent episodes, he only lost his mobile telephone.  Well, thank heaven for small mercies.