On the road
being detained at his majesty’s pleasure can have a potent effect on the creative juices, as the jailbird accounts of writers from Oscar Wilde to Jeffrey Archer make clear. When I was in hot water over a traffic matter and looking at a three-stretch —three hours on a speed-awareness course — I surprised myself by coming up with a movie pitch. It’s Fast & Furious (the gas-guzzling, tyre-shredding, points-accumulating franchise) meets The Usual Suspects. We open with the police nicking a bunch of speed merchants and banging them up together to face the music. But instead of taking part in an ID parade like Keyser Söze and co, this mob meet on a course like the one I was going to attend. Hugh Grant continues his brilliant run of playing against type as a Deliveroo driver with a motorbike and sidecar. We meet him after officers pull over what appears to be a fast-moving Jenga of pizza boxes. There’s a homage to Benny Hill from Vinnie Jones as London’s last working milkman, whose float is souped up by his boy-racer nephews and caught doing a ton on the Westway. A bent copper (Helen Mirren) has thrown a dragnet over the city to trap these road runners as she’s secretly putting together a crew of elite drivers, perhaps for a bank job or kidnapping.
Put it down to nerves, but I was storyboarding this road movie in my head on the morning of my course. A camera clocked me doing 26mph in one of the 20mph zones which are almost everywhere in London now (cheers, Sadiq!). Because I had a clean licence, and wasn’t too far over the speed limit, I was offered the opportunity of taking a class with the prospect of no further action — ie no points — if I said yes. To reinforce the message about watching my horsepower, I had to pony up £92 and make sure I didn’t bunk over the wall or otherwise go AWOL during the session. Nine of us errant motorists, from all corners of the capital and the Home Counties, assembled first thing on a Monday under the tutelage of an instructor called Jackie. (Not her real name: if you are a speedawareness instructor who happens to be called Jackie, apologies for any confusion.) “I also do the naughty class, but you’re not on that one today,” Jackie assured us. Was there a separate regime for the hard cases, I wondered, the tearaways and the TWOC-ers? By contrast, we were the sort of drivers who, in the days before speed cameras, might have expected a highway-patrol officer to rest a lugubrious forearm on the windowsill and say, “Now then, Nigel Mansell, we’re a long way from Monza, aren’t we?” That said, we were told that further speeding by any of us in the next three years would automatically incur points.
What sort of things might lead us to go over the limit, asked Jackie. With moist palms, I thought of the slaloming SUVs of the North Circular, alternately tail-gating and undertaking, so tha
