Our Cars: Charlotte Cobbs
26 January 2012: Situational awareness
In this lesson I had my first situation to deal with within about five minutes; there were road works on the left with a workman who had his back to me, but he knew I was there. On the right were two pedestrians who were also aware of me and moved over, as there weren’t any pavements to use. The car coming towards me because I was on their side of the road to get around the road works had seen me too.
It held back and let me go, which was all fine. The problem was the completely oblivious old man and his poodle walking all the over the place in front of me. The dog knew I was there but the owner had no idea. So, I crept behind him until Vaughan beeped him and he finally looked at me and moved over.
We continued through all the usual haunts, turning left here, practicing my right turns there and going straight on at the various crossroads and mini roundabouts. All this led us to the next town, where I wasn’t surprised to hear Vaughan say: “Pull over on the left, just before the junction because you’re going to reverse around that corner”.
Just pulling over was a shambles as I stopped and crawled over to the curb because I was scared of it. That wasn’t the best start and resulted in an unsuccessful reverse-round-a-corner, as I would’ve hit the curb if Vaughan hadn’t stopped me. But, unlike many lessons, it only took two attempts for me to get it right.
So, we carried on eventually to a set of traffic lights at the end of a 40mph road, which presented another weird situation for me to sort out. The traffic lights were green when I got to them and Vaughan had asked me to turn right.
So, I pulled forward to the traffic lights and crossing. But there was a car in front doing the same thing, waiting for traffic from the right. The car in front wasn’t far enough forward, so I couldn’t get the right position either and we were both waiting there.The most logical thing to do was leave a gap between us and let the car on the right go through.
Vaughan tried to talk to me about how I’d dealt with this situation but I couldn’t fully understand what he was saying and completely concentrate on driving, so he let me drive on for a little while longer.
He got me to pull over when there was an opportunity, even if was on a busy residential road with cars parked on both sides all the way along it. Even Vaughan was perplexed by the situation because of the position the car in front of me had been in and he decided “You weren’t wrong. It was a weird one”.
In order not to confuse ourselves any further, Vaughan told me to “drive on”. We headed back towards the usual places. But we didn’t quite get there before going to a dual carriageway. This time was much better. We came off at “the next junction” and turned left at the roundabout onto the same country lane as in a previous lesson.
It was all fine until the last five minutes or so of the lesson, when I had to go down a narrow one-way street, with people parked very inconsiderately, if not dangerously, so much so that Vaughan was using the horn again. Ah, the joys of driving!
Despite all that, today was a relatively good lesson, with me feeling less tense on the fast roads.
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