It’s a couple of years since I was last picked up by The Fuzz.

It was getting close to midnight, and I’d clambered into my jazzy new hatchback to drive home from the train station. After a 16-hour work day, trekking up and down to London, I was knackered and knew I needed to concentrate on my driving, so I was going slower than normal.

As I left the city and entered the suburbs, I noticed a vehicle following me. It continued to tail me for a couple of miles on the big roads, but when it kept following after I turned into the maze of avenues that lead to my house, I started worrying. I was just about to call my husband, when the blue lights came on and I pulled into the kerb. Obviously, I assumed there was an axe murderer in my boot wafting a severed head just out of my eye line. That must be it, as obviously I wasn’t doing anything wrong.

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I wound down my window as the officer walked up to my car. The young bloke saw my face and smiled in a manner I couldn’t quite place.

“What’s going on?” I blustered.

He nodded at the car, “This new is it?”

I was a bit thrown. “Urm, yes,” I said. “We’ve only had it a week. Why?”

“And you haven’t had a drink, have you?” he casually enquired.

I was outraged. “I most CERTAINLY have not!”

He smiled again. “Fair enough. You haven’t got your lights on and you were going very slowly so I thought I’d check you were OK.”

I looked at the dashboard. Mortified, I clicked them on.

“Oh bloody ‘ell. I’m sorry. I thought I had. I was concentrating, I’ve been up since 5am.”

He smiled that smile again. “Don’t worry, I can see you’re all right.”

And that was it. He walked back to his car, and I drove home. It wasn’t until the next day when I realised he was finding me amusing, that I was furious. That was the smile I couldn’t place. Once he clocked that I was just a flustered old matron, I was completely beyond suspicion. How dare he? I am young and dangerous! Friggin’ profiling, is that. Still, I suppose it means I’d be a dab hand as a career criminal, should the teaching gigs dry up - I could get away with murder with my apparent total lack of threat.

Teaching on speed

Anyway, my second brush with the law happened a few months ago and I paid my debt to society last week. My most recent crime was similarly packed with action and glamour. I got caught doing 36mph in a 30mph road. I honestly thought it was a 40mph limit and I was being sensible, but I was wrong. So, after being booked on a speed awareness course that was cancelled due to Covid-19, I was allowed to get it over with online via Microsoft Teams. How modern!

It’s a rare experience for a teacher to be taught without their teacher knowing that their student is also a teacher. Well, that was as clear as muck, but y’know what I mean?… Teachers teaching other teachers can be a tough gig. There’s always some smart arse who thinks they know better. I’ve been on both sides of the teacher/smart arse divide.

My state-enforced teacher had no interest in any of us personally and it was very clear that this was conveyor-belt education. He began his three-hour lesson by reminding us that “It’s the Highway Code, not the my-way code.” Then he ploughed straight on with his script, asking us to write answers down on paper and show it to the camera, without so much as a query about inclusion needs, literacy, Esol, any of that. He was only just on the right side of a Little Britain character, veering seamlessly between the grave threat of our cars potentially killing children (this came up a lot) and jaunty rhymes to remember road stuff. Accessibility blunders aside, I was well into him.

And the rhymes came in thick and fast…

You must slow down when approaching a village, and how do you know you’re approaching a village? That’s right ≠ there’ll be a church:

“See the steeple, where are the people?”

How do you know if the road you are on is a dual carriageway? Look for the barriers:

“If there’s paint, then it ain’t.”

And he asked us all to join in his chant about leaving a safe distance between cars. And we did with gusto: “Only a fool breaks the two-second rule! Only a fool breaks the two-second rule!” In fact, I enjoyed it so much that I was a little concerned at how easily I could be radicalised.

There were slightly amateurish videos underscored by knock-off Casualty music, bits of PowerPoint with indecipherable graphics, and a quiz. But I learned a lot. And to give the teacher the biggest compliment of all, those three hours sped past. Something I definitely won’t be doing in future.  

Sarah Simons works in colleges and adult community education in the East Midlands and is the director of UKFEchat