I came down to earth with a thump after the spellbinding Jubilee weekend by attending a Speeding Awareness Course at the Sixfields Football Stadium in Northampton. It lasted four and a quarter hours and was held in the windowless shareholders’ lounge of the Northampton Football Club, not a nice place in which to spend a long afternoon.
I had been tempted to pay a fine and have three points put on my currently clean driving licence rather than undergo this dispiriting experience, especially as I had already been on a Speeding Awareness Course four years earlier and knew what I was in for. On both occasions I had been caught by a speed camera going 35mph along a road with a 30mph limit and was offered the option of indoctrination as an alternative to a formal punishment. But such is the proliferation of speed cameras in Northamptonshire (a county long known as ‘the speed camera capital of Great Britain’, just as it is now also shamefully known as its ‘wind farm capital’), and so easy is it to drift unintentionally above a speed limit when one’s mind is on other things that it seemed prudent to avoid collecting any points at all.
So off I went to the Sixfields Stadium to join about two dozen other repentant miscreants in being lectured on road safety by a couple of experts in the field, who took it in turns to impress on us the error of our ways. We were told in letters from the police beforehand that we would be ‘delegates’ to the course, which was an odd word to use as we were representing no one but ourselves; but then every area of professional activity tends to develop its own quirky vocabulary.
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