Our Cars: Charlotte Cobbs
12 December 2011: More reversing...
When I got in Vaughan’s car today, we started with all the small talk we usually do: “How was your week?” before the question I’d been waiting for came: “Have you done any driving?” I hesitated because I knew the consequences of what I was going to say, but I had to come clean: “Yeah, my Dad and I spent about an hour reversing around a corner at the weekend.”
Then I knew what my day would be focused on…
So we followed the regular route, going through all the usual haunts, taking “the next right” and “the next right, please”, until we arrived in a residential road. It wasn’t the same one I’d spent all that time on with Dad, but it was going to serve the same purpose. Or so I thought.
Vaughan wanted to mark my homework. So, I drove along the road, stopping just past the T-junction, about a metre away from the curb, put the stick into neutral and pulled the handbrake up.
I knew Vaughan would want to talk about the drive I’d just done before I continued with the rest of the lesson: “It was a good drive but you need to watch your meeting situations. There were 3; the first one you didn’t give way where you should have, the second one you didn’t need to give way, but you did, and at the third one, you did nothing where you should’ve given way”. OK, so I need to concentrate more when meeting situations arise, because I know I can deal with them properly when they do.
Then it was judgement time. I really hoped it would go alright because I knew I could do it. I put the car into reverse and crept the car backwards. I waited for the junction to disappear slightly, as I’d done with Dad, and turned the wheel, only to be struck by déjà vu.
It started off nicely, with the car following the line it was supposed to. But it all went wrong as I oversteered and, you guessed it, hit the curb. So, whatever had clicked with Dad last lesson had come out of place again since. I put the car back into the first gear and drove round to where we started.
The second time wasn’t any better so I drove round again and Vaughan changed tactic: “Just drive along and stop about two-car widths away from that lamp post”. How do I judge that? I drove along until he told me to stop, at the start of another T-junction. That’s a much easier marker - why didn’t you just say that?
Vaughan asked me to reverse straight along the road. It was more “slalom” back along the road, than straight. So, I did it two more times, with similar results. It wasn’t helped by the fact I had to keep stopping for cars, cyclists and pedestrians to go around. I know, it’s no excuse, and at least they gave me the chance to correct my mistakes with Dad last time.
Then Vaughan realised my right wing-mirror was too high, so I changed it and tried again. Halfway along, I also noticed I was going a little bit too fast. Those modifications must’ve had some impact as the next time I tried to reverse straight along the road, “it was almost perfect.”
He was only nit-picking because I’d gone out slightly but rectified it straight away. Yay! “Now, guess what? You’re going to do it again” “and I’m going to do it perfectly this time”. Or not - it was still only “almost perfect”.
With reversing straight now in place (if not perfect), it was time to try reversing around the corner again. It was worse than the first time. I went too wide at first, then tried again and hit the curb. It got to the point where Vaughan said: “drive on and we’ll do something else.”
“Something else” was driving home. This drive wasn’t as good as the drive there, as I began to go too wide around parked cars and make wrong decisions, probably because we’d been crawling for the last hour and my brain was still on auto-pilot.
That aside, Dad knows what he’ll be doing this weekend.
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