ON: This week, being me.

This week I passed my Advanced Driving Test.

I asked it to generate a pic for Driving Test. Doesn’t look quite road legal.

It made me wonder what other people's most recent qualification is? Tell me in the comments.
I might do First Aid next.

I am a mixture of life long learner but simultaneously a ridiculously under qualified individual.
A few years ago I quietly (very quietly, I mean, hardly anyone knows, or cares, and nor should they!) qualified as a Personal Trainer.
“Big Wow” you might think, (I love ‘big wow’ and am trying to bring it back) “is your fall-back plan to stand around a Pure Gym with a squirty cleaning bottle wiping the seats of exercise bikes for pretty close to minimum wage?”

Possibly!

In Lockdown Times Joe Wicks’ YouTube fitness classes were so popular he signed a One Million Pound book deal!
Many talented people write on Substack for free so a Million Pound book deal seems rather a lot…

Apparently it was especially difficult to negotiate with a Personal Trainer because every time the publisher said “this is our final offer” he said “Come on, give me ten more!”
Eventually they reached a deal. I suspect because Joe got hungry at around £950000.

Advanced Driving, like many forms of learning these days, is absolutely peppered with acronyms and initials. You have to know your IPSGA from your TUG and your POWDERY.
In motoring generally there are a lot of three letter acronyms.
In the UK the first motorcycle tuition one needs is a CBT which is Compulsory Basic Training and is not to be confused with CBT: Cognitive Behavioural Therapy, or indeed CBT: Cock and Ball Torture (kinky, and defo not for me, I am a maybe on getting counselling one day but I would be a hard no on any abuse of Little Alun)

Any car owner who's ever been frustrated to the point of no return by a Diesel Particulate Filter problem will always grimace at the letters DPF or EGR or have a tense flashback as I do because I went to collect the car in an LBD (Little Black Dress) I thought I was joining in with the three letter acronyms!

For decades I have been truly embracing how monumentally boring I am. When I am a car passenger I fear my boringness may endanger other road users. Many an Uber driver looks sleepy at the start of a journey, imagine how snoozy they look 15 minutes away from a regional Arts centre whilst I am droning on to them about DPFs, or the merits of IPSGA, or the sensibleness of overpaying on a mortgage and thus avoiding compound interest.

I have had a few drivers accelerate towards a wall in an attempt at hari kari, and I certainly wouldn’t take a cab anywhere coastal in case we careered off a cliff.


This week my Radio 4 Stand Up Special was repeated. It has lots of jokes about my feeling marginalised as a Centrist Dad (bit lefty here, bit of right there) and thus separated from the Far Left activists of much modern comedy. (This is very prevalent in the media, social media and in artsy festival places, but far less in weekend comedy clubs)
Aside from wondering what odd payment amount I can forward to as the repeat fee (38p is my guess) it mainly made me nostalgic for a time when I only felt isolated from comedians because some of them were so hectoring about Brexit or the number of Boris Johnson's children. Now they are hounding people out of theatres for not being pro Palestine enough. I feel even further isolation.

This week I saw a comedian’s Instagram post demanding a ceasefire (from Israel, seemingly, not from Hamas, it never is) and in the comments people were ‘outing’ celebrities who have publicly supported Israel. Someone asked “Does anyone have a list of them, so we can boycott their work?”
People are drawing up lists of (mainly Jewish) celebrities who are to be punished.

I shuddered.

This week I got jealous of Jack Reacher on the TV show, Reacher. Even as a 6 '6 musclebound Adonis of a man, he found clothes that fitted him really well in a charity bin!
How?
I am only 6’2 or 6’3 and I sometimes leave a big TK Maxx empty handed.

This week, has certainly been up and down.