"How do you think you're doing this lesson?" asks my instructor.
"I think that I'm doing pretty well today," I say.
"Yes, I think that you're doing pretty well," she replies in a breathless flight of imagination that would compell every novellist of today to just give up their craft and become burger-flippers, safe in the knowledge that they can never compare to my driving instructor on the imagination front. No, seriously, nice comment there love, I liked the way that you just took what I said, changed one pronoun and added the words "Yes, I think..." to make it TOTALLY your own creation. No, seriously, bravo, teacher. I'm dedicating my Oscar to you. You're a fecken inspiration to all of us.
So then I'm driving happily down the road, carefully avoiding the pedestrian ("She's going to get herself killed, crossing in front of the road of you like that," says the instructor helpfully and encouragingly). I then see that there are some cars on my side of the road, so I carefully check top mirror, right side mirror, then take down the speed a little, as I'm supposed to do, and I carefully pull out exactly the width of a car door away so that I don't hit the parked cars (because GOD, we don't want that, do we?). We pootle along. I then see that the long line of cars is ending, so I should carefully maneuver back onto my side of the road. I check top mirror then left side mirror, as all good car-conducting gremlins are taught by the high-viziar of driving, then I carefully steer back. Unfortunately, I do this just a little too early, and I manage to crash noisily into the side of the final car on the row.
I don't know if there were any spectators nearby to view the terrible scene, but if there were, they would have beheld a sight that looked something like THIS:

But don't worry, people, I'm not hurt. Neither was my instructor. Thank GOD, we were wearing seatbelts. And helmets. Still, we both fell into a deep paroxym of shock; my knees turned to jelly, and I'm pretty sure that her shins morphed into trifle. It all seemed to happen in slow motion. Actually, I lie. Most of it (ie: the crash) happened in what seemed to be ultra-fast motion. The things that happened in slow motion were:
1: My instructor's realisation that I was about to total her car,
2: My instructor's movements to grab the wheel and to stop me from wiping out. She was probably distracted. I bet she was too busy thinking up another variation on her hugely imaginative take on "I think you're doing pretty well today" (based on my earlier, original "I think I'm doing pretty well today" comment ).
You know all the crashes you see on TV and in movies? It's like a million times worse in real life. I mean, who would have thought that two wing mirrors colliding could have been so BRUTAL? I'm just relieved that nobody important got hurt. When I think about what could have happened if, say, a toddler's head had been between the two wing mirrors and then instead of colliding together, the wing mirrors had just popped that toddler's head like a ripe pomegranete, and toddler brains and seeds and delicious juice had spashed over the floor like so much sticky swamp-mush... well, it makes me shiver. Shiver like a welshman.
Following our cataclysmic crash, I managed to brilliantly pilot the car to the side of the road (check mirrors, signal, cover the brake, cover the clutch, steer in, steer out, straighten wheels, clutch down, brake). How the car got all that way following the fender-bender, I'll never know. I guess the ghost of Thord, Patron Hammer-God of Cars and Car Engines was riding with us in that yellow MG that hour. When we were parked, the teacher rolled down the window and twisted our wing mirror back into place. Magically, it seemed that the car was unharmed, almost as if it was DESIGNED to bend back in the case of a crash such as ours.
"Well, you hit that parked car," said the teacher, obviously in the midst of reasearching her phd on Saying the Obvious at Annoying Times, but we're not damaged. I don't know if he is. What should we do now?"
"Well," I said, wiping the burnt-rubber from my handbrake turn from my eyes, "I guess we should go back and, you know, write a note and leave it on his windscreen or something?"
"Yeah," she said. "But lets just keep driving."
So I did, safe in the knowledge that I was totally not to blame for the collision. For the following reasons:
1: I'm a learner driver, and can thus do whatever the hell I want. I can ever scootle down the middle of a busy road in first gear at a leisurely 7mph, and that business suit wearing twat in the silver BMW behind me can't do shit to stop me. This also means that I can stall whenever I want and hold everybody up. As that wise philosopher Britney Spears once catawauled, "It's my perogative."
2: My driving instructor told me that it was the car owner's fault. For parking there. Apparently the road was too narrow. Hey, I'm not complaining.
3: The car I crashed into was white. Who gives a shit about a feken white car? I probably raised its overall value by scraping yellow paint onto it.
Sadly, that wasn't the first car that I've gone into while piloting a moving vehicle. The other summer I managed to cycle into the back of a parked Renault Laguna. On my BIKE. Pretty slick, eh? I managed to break the back tail-light with my head, and possibly dent the bodywork with my ribs. Actually, I probably caused more damage when I hit a laguna with my own body, than when I hit a white shitsmobile with a natty yellow MG. I must be like, a superhero, forged of bronze. Luckily, I still had enough wits to get back on the bike and cycle off as far as my little legs could carry me. When I told my parents about my car/head altercation, I got the following exchange:
"Well, did anybody see you?"
"Uh, don't think so."
"Are you sure?"
"Yeah..."
"Well, best just leave it then. Insurance'll cover it, and anyway, they'd probably try and scam us by making the damage worse."
So now you know why my moral compass is in the pitiful state it is.
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