You can’t parka there: a middle-aged mod and the scooter driving test

To ride a scooter one must first journey through the world of its mortal enemy – the motorbike. The tests are the same but the attitudes are not. Jon Bounds put himself through it all so you don’t have to.

Falling off a motorbike doing 30mph hurts. A bit. Especially if you’re wearing an army surplus parka rather than the armoured leathers you see around you. What hurts more is having to shrug it off and fence the banter of the hairy-arsed bikers who are supposed to be teaching you to drive.

“I bet you’re glad you wore your brown trousers,” one had said when I’d skidded to a halt a few minutes earlier. It took me a while to get what he was on about, I hadn’t really noticed I’d done anything so stupid I should have been scared.

At around a quarter to eight on a Thursday morning I’m huddled around an instant coffee, no milk, in a portacabin behind a disused greyhound track. I’ve been sent here almost in disgrace for performing an emergency stop too well – so well that the bike stopped more quickly than I did, leaving me skidding across the asphalt, hole in jacket, hole in arm. But I’m alright, I say. I have my driving test in an hour.

Two years ago, when I – in a particularly low-horsepower bit of a mid-life crisis – bought a scooter I didn’t really know what I was doing. I’d always wanted one and had bought an original Vespa to “do up” about 10 years previously. I never managed to get it started and it followed me through two house moves as nothing more than an ornament in the shed before I sold it. The traffic situation around Oxford was the perfect excuse to try again; I bought a decent looking bike from eBay. Then I tried to find out how to ride it.

The rules of the road have got a lot more complicated since the Quadrophenia boys rode down to Brighton; then, you could just ride. Now you need to get a CBT (compulsory basic training) certificate before you can put L-plates on. And you get those in a car park or wasteground, because you need to be somewhere you can ride without hitting other traffic. And in my case you get that by riding an actual motorbike with gears and a clutch for the first time, because you’re not allowed to ride your own easier, automatic gearboxed, scooter on the road to get there.

I never quite got the hang of the gears, which you change with your foot, nor the clutch, which is done with the left hand and that’s why when confronted with a real reason – a group of cyclists pulling out without looking – to pull up sharpish, I come a cropper. I pull both hand brakes in tight; one isn’t a brake, it’s the clutch. The front wheel stops, the back wheel keeps going. I hit the deck. It seems to be impossible to fail the CBT, though, as once back on the road I get my piece of paper entitling me to ride for two years.

Two years later, having pootled around town trying my best to look as much like Gregory Peck in Roman Holiday as you can when leaning into the wind on the A34, I realised I needed to take my driving test for real.

The problem is that the whole world of the motorbike is geared for those that like black, speed, leather, grease, and – well – motorbikes. You won’t find a scooter test, or scooter instructors, so you have to deal with the traditional enemy: the rocker. I had a fair idea that I could ride to a decent standard, but no idea what the actual test process was. So after some research I booked on a crash course and the three tests I needed: a theory test, and what they call Module One and Module Two. Mod one is on yet another car park, around cones and including that emergency stop. Mod two is much more like the car driving test I took when I was 17.

I pass the theory test at the second attempt, in a modern office block in the centre of Oxford. Being too old to have had to take a separate theory test before, I have no idea what I’m doing. First time out I get 50 out of 50 in the highway code, but somehow fail the computer game hazard perception section. I didn’t see this bit being difficult at all.

Next time I press long and hard at almost everything on screen and pass, despite being told that I’ve “clicked inappropriately” on some of the questions. Whoever made them can’t live round here; old ladies on their pushbikes are one of the most hazardous hazards I’ve perceived.

The instruction days are long, and cold, and in a car park. By some sort of cultural osmosis they are rather macho, people young enough to become experienced motorbike riders, young enough to want to teach people for a living, are very into what they ride. They like motorbikes, they like the tang of petrol and the open road, they like all-in-one clothing. And they are all seemingly called Rob.

My helmet is a cause of much sneering hilarity: because it is old-fashioned, a semi-sphere, and has separate goggles. Because it looks stylish, rather than the luminous alien of a wannabe tobogganist.

“I wouldn’t wear one,” says one instructor, probably Rob. “Why did you choose that type?”

“Because it fits under my seat,” I say. And it does, which is a bonus. What I don’t say is, “because I’m a mod”. And what the dull wits don’t notice is that there is something actually hilarious about my “lid” (all things have a macho slang here). In between me buying it when I first had a scooter and me actually having a scooter to ride, the white with a central black stripe style became synonymous with another wearer – the Crazy Frog.

I do learn a lot though, there’s a great deal of stuff about riding a bike that you don’t pick up on your own. I really hadn’t ever considered the difference between the two brakes and when to use them, nor did I really know where to check the oil. However, I can’t get the emergency stop right.

In the module one test, you need to get up to 30mph and then stop when the examiner raises his hand. Getting my scooter to go that fast in the space available is tricky, there’s just about enough of a run-up if I go flat out – which makes the stopping harder. I can stop quickly but not safely enough, say the Robs and I don’t get to complete all the practice before the end of the day.

As my test is booked for later that week I arrange a couple of hours’ private tuition beforehand. A different, more gentle, Rob has advice: “Pretend your bollocks are under the back brake handle.”

And then I get it really wrong.

When you come off a motorbike there isn’t much time to think about what you’re going to do. You are going along and then you are lying on the floor, a few feet away from your spluttering steed.

But I get up, dust myself down and manage to pass the test. I’m surprised, but it’s cost me about £300 to get this far so I think I’ve paid my dues. The module two practice day goes without too much incident. It really consists of you and another learner driving round while in radio contact with an instructor; we are in convoy and the biggest problem is not losing the other two. Oh, and trying to get my scooter up to the speeds we are trying to demonstrate on the A roads. Oh, that and putting up with the commentary – the radios are one-way and we can’t talk back: “keep your eyes on the road, I saw you looking at that bird. They should be banned, too distracting.”

When it comes to the module two test a few days later, I think I’ve got it sorted. I’ve got the rhythm of looking in the mirrors, sitting in a safe position in traffic and of the various looks and glances you have to move your head to demonstrate that you’re doing. It’s not enough to look behind you, for this you have to be seen to have looked, although I’m not sure it’s ever covered about what you do if you see what you’re looking for. Luckily, it never really comes up.

The test goes smoothly, around the back streets of Cowley – an area I know well – and we arrive back outside the back door of Oxford United’s ground, which the test centre uses as an office, with me thinking that I might have done it. But I’d not left enough space joining a dual carriageway, enough space between me and an Audi doing 90, in the real world he would just have had to slow down – and I would have got to smile – but in the world of the driving test it’s a “serious fault”, an automatic fail.

And that’s the two years up. Not enough time to take another test. I return home with my fishtail between my legs. But I’ve come far enough to keep going.

The following Sunday I take my CBT again and breeze through it. The hardest bit is affecting a face that says “I know the answer to your question, Rob, but I’m not saying so as to give the other guys a go.”

Then I have to get another test slot; I’m on my own with this and the DVLA website. I spend ages looking at the help pages trying to work out what I should book – the forms are built for motorbikes. Eventually I select what I think is the correct test.

I’m taking no chances and call up the local garage, another place that’s a maze of macho and me nodding sagely at terms I don’t understand. The brakes have been sticking a bit and there’s a rattle from somewhere. And the other day a mudguard fell off – a result of the incident before my first test.

I’m on my way home from work, the night before the test, on the bus when Rob from the garage calls. What he thought was just a new cable needed turns out to be much worse – a sticking disk that meant the back brake was going on too hard. It’s a reason I found stopping quickly too easy. It’s also a reason it won’t be ready for my test. Gutted I go online and cancel, I’ve lost the fee but it’s polite not to leave the examiner hanging around.

Then the garage calls back, they’ve worked late, into overtime, and fixed it. Which would be fantastic if I’d not already called the test off. Another £100 quid, plus £75 for another test. I have to make the next one count, this is seriously mounting up and I don’t think I can go through another day of training.

The test centre is about 20 minutes away from home according to Google Maps, but as I close the front door at quarter to eleven for an 11:16 start I realise that those timings don’t factor in a vehicle with a top speed of about 60mph, downhill. And as I fire up the engine, only two goes this time, there’s petrol to be got as well. This is going to be tight.

I start off in a hurry, only to clunk to a stop after a foot having forgotten to take the security chain off the front wheel. Dismount, carefully pull the chain through the wheel, start again. I make it, just, nerves all over the place.

It goes quickly, I miss a signal when doing a hill start. I can’t see the speedo down a national speed limit road as the sun’s in my eyes. I wobble when starting off at one point for no good reason. It’s up in the air.

“I can tell you you’ve failed, if you’d rather,” says Rob, when I express surprise and thanks. He’s probably unaware that he did the same joke last time. He’s a nice man, and really seems to like his job, carefully pointing out my mistakes — none were enough to stop me passing, but I should watch them.

Out of respect for his love of safe motorcycling I wait until I’m round the corner to take both hands off the handlebars and punch the air.

By the book: we are what we read, not what we say we do

There are bookshelves in all but one room of our house, and the one in which there aren’t any is the one in which I perhaps most often sit and read. In our bedroom there are shelves from floor to ceiling that sometimes oppress me as I try to sleep — “you don’t know everything, yet”, they taunt. “you haven’t read all of us.”

Nearer to me are the books I’m currently reading; there are five on my bedside table. Some started already, concert tickets and receipts poking from the top marking my place. Some are placed there as a reminder of their place in the queue, more in hope than expectation as there’s at least one that’s sat there for over a year.

Some never make it, like Paul Kingsnorth’s Booker prize-longlisted The Wake. I backed it on trendy crowdfunding site Unbound as I loved the ideas and the depth of world it wanted to create. I loved the unusual binding and the care that had been taken on the language. And I tried to read it, I really did, but never got more than a few pages in, chewing on the phonetic Anglo Saxon like so much beef gristle in a stodgy pudding. It staked its place permanently next to the bed, looking away with disdain as I skipped merrily through Viv Albertine’s memoir and danced a gnostic tango through the early 90s football and rave culture clutching Julian Cope’s insane One Three One.

I’ll confess, as I was again cheating on it with an ebook , I knew it was over. I would never read The Wake — and I sold it: a rare act of pragmatism in a life that’s seen me acquire more and more books I will simply never read.

This year I’ve bought books on the English Civil War (I had a vague idea for a novel set at the time), a collection of the letters between the Mitford Sisters (I’ve read a lot of collections of letters this year: PG Wodehouse, Orwell), biographies of Orwell, Truman Capote, HG Wells, all piled up on the shelves. There are tumbling pamphlets of poetry, gazed on then forgotten. My literary eyes are bigger than my literate belly.

I’ve read a book about Frank Sidebottom, a trashy biography of Fleetwood Mac, novels by my friends that have made me simultaneously proud and jealous, two books about the history of rhetoric (why?, oh why?, oh why?), more than one book about the Spanish Civil War, GK Chesterton’s The Man Who Was Thursday, which somehow clawed itself out of the the unread pile due to continued recommendation. And I spent months on the monolithic Ragged Trousered Philanthropistsas you may have read.

Jonathan Meades’s An Encyclopaedia of Myself is astoundingly clever and insightful, but by the time I’d finished it I’d turned away many times. A Penguin edition of Nabakov’s Bend Sinister that I started just because it was small enough to take on holiday, another book about the Spanish Civil War and, most tellingly, the second of Danny Baker’s autobiographies (which made me leak with laughter).

The listing of the books I’ve bought but not read this year has helped me realise something about myself; I’m not as well read as I would like to think I am. For every classic or improving work I might get through, there are many discarded. Meades is everything I might want to be, but Baker is closer to the mark.

I’ve just put back onto the bedside table Umberella by Will Self. Will Self I love, his sheer exactitude of language, his invention, his coining of “slapped buttock” to perfectly describe David Cameron’s face, but his last novels have stalled on me. I got Umbrella on release, a signed copy, and started it straight away; months later and I’d given up, relegated it to the shelving. Having done almost the same with his previous, The Book of Dave, it took a degree of self awareness I don’t usually possess not to buyShark, at least not in hardback. That it is a sequel to the unfulfilled Umbrella, now back in rotation as I embarrass myself for giving up too easily — for not being clever enough — might have been the push I needed.

But I can’t be alone in my behaviour. Thomas Piketty’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century spent three weeks on top of the NY Times bestseller lists in the summer, and I would bet that my copy isn’t the only one simply acting as gloating shelf ballast. But looking at previous books and previous years, I knew I was never going to pick Capital up. Not just because it is heavy, but because it is heavy-going — and perhaps more than that because its ideas can be distilled to summary articles and pass notes. I don’t need to understand the graphs to get the picture.

If my shelves were on public display — like the style guides and copy of grammarian’s bible Strunk and White I have on my desk at work, while rarely opening then — I could see why one might buy books that looked good even if one knew that they would gather nothing but dust. But mine aren’t. I’m also not that precious about books as objects — I eventually give them away to charity shops, I (shock) turn pages down, I even buy ebooks.

eBooks that, inevitably, I don’t read all of.

eBook readers, so we’re told, allow a privacy — a self truth — we can read what we like and no one will know. This was given as a reason for the initial success of 50 Shades of Grey, before it and its visual lexicon filled every supermarket book department in the world. The main difference between the charts of the top 10 physical books and their Kindle equivalent this year is Veronica Roth’sDivergent trilogy dominating the ebook top 10. Is young adult fiction secretly popular with people who would be too embarrassed to say, or is this difference more about young adults being more open to reading on screen? If only Amazon would let us know what percentage of the way through these books people made it. My electronic copy of The Wake sits resolutely in the low numbers for “progress”.

As I have no rational explanation for why I keep buying books I’m never going to read, I conclude that I must be self-deluding — at least at the point of purchase. For years I convinced myself I was a decent footballer, so this is not without precedent.

I spent some time talking to psychologist Maliheh Taheri, a researcher at the University of Birmingham, who was reluctant to call this a self-delusion and was happier to list the other reasons why people might buy books and not read them: collecting, decoration, or just comfort in knowing that they were there. None of them apply to me, or at least that’s what I’m telling myself.

Our conversation sort of petered out as I pressed for a diagnosis; it turns out that self-deception (rather than delusion) isn’t accepted as even existing by all thinkers. The paradox, some say, being that it isn’t logically possible to hold two conflicting views. But I must, sometimes; I bought (mistakenly two copies of, but that’s another story) The Establishment by Owen Jones — and remembered thinking to myself that I’d never get round to reading it as I pressed “checkout”. It’s hard to think of any reason why any sane person would do that.

Evolutionary biologist Robert Trivers, however, suggests that self-deception might have benefits; if we are able to believe our own distortions, we will not present signs of deception (eye movement, voice tone and so on) and will therefore appear to be telling the truth. He says it’s ”hiding the truth from yourself to hide it more deeply from others”.

The delusion is necessary for us to be able to lie more easily, to lessen the cognitive dissonance we feel when presenting the view of ourselves we want to to others.

So in this case I could be buying a 1,000 page treatise on economics because I want to convince other people that I’m the sort of person who can and does read 1,000 page treatises on economics — and it really doesn’t matter whether I have or not.

Not least because we can be fairly sure they haven’t either.

I’m deluded, but it doesn’t matter it seems. No, I don’t fully understand it either — although I have just ordered a book.