Friday the Thirteenth

Not sure how clearly this will come out, but these are coyote tracks. Random, I know.

So Friday the thirteenth was an unusually stressful day for me, but ultimately successful. I had booked another road test, and as soon as I had done so I went into a complete funk, I think that's the correct and technical medical term. Whatever the books tell you about high blood pressure being a silent killer and having no symptoms, I can tell you that if you do have a tendency towards it as I do, you may be able to feel when it goes up and remains high. I also had a continuous headache.

When you tell people that after thirty years driving you are in the position of having to take a driving test again, they all, and I mean all without exception, say that they wouldn't like to be in that position. Most people will then make some comment about how it must be because we drive on the left in Britain. Well, for that point, I think, not so much. Most Brits have some experience of driving on the right because it is so easy for us to drive in mainland Europe, but in any case, that is something you get used to quickly. It was easier for me to get used to driving on the right, than to having the gearstick to my right.

Many years ago I worked with a woman called Wynn. I can remember her very clearly, and this was when I was in my early twenties. She was tall and graceful with iron grey hair. And she was a very wise and intelligent woman, we would go to her for advice and she was able to find solutions more intuitively than us young 'uns. But for all that, she could not pass a driving test. She finally did on the 13th attempt and we all celebrated.

I have been thinking about Wynn since being put in this awful position. I'm sure it is quite simply more difficult to pass exams and tests when you are older because you get way more nervous than when you are younger. I don't think I ever appreciated that until this experience. I would say that my driving yesterday, when I passed, was possibly the worst I have driven since I came here because my legs were like jelly and there is an insistence here on keeping the car in first gear instead of neutral when stopped for example, so I was worried I was actually going to be unable to do that. I was in the most appalling mental state, I had to think what my name was the first time I was asked to sign something, and the next time I was shaking so much I was barely able to.
In part of course this was due to my previous unpleasant test.
But I also think that more is expected of you when you are older. For a younger person, they will let a lot go, for an older one, every gear change is analysed. This was most definitely a message I got from that first examiner.

Yesterday, in stark contrast, the examiner, a softly spoken Irishman, instead of creating a bag of nerves, took a great deal of time to calm me and let me do things in my own time. The kindly citizens of Vancouver were also out in force to help. Every time someone else does something bizarre on the road in your road test, it is an opportunity to slow down, even sometimes stop the car depending on the extremity of lemming-like behaviour, and comment on it.

Although most people can empathise with the position of having to take a driving test after so many years of driving, what is more difficult to get is the feeling of having a right removed. It was Lori really who picked up on that because she had lived for a year in Hong Kong. It made me feel more of an outsider to have to have someone else with a licence in the car with me when I drove. It removed a freedom from me that I wouldn't even have thought about had it not been removed. I am a walker, cyclist, taker of buses, but when suddenly, you don't have the option to drive it is a gaping hole.
And then there is the rubbing of the salt into the wound. You are driving at the speed limit with everyone passing you, you are keeping the car positioned perfectly on the road with others wandering over the central line, weaving backwards and forwards, undertaking, overtaking, unable to steer the car.
I took some lessons after the first test, partly because I didn't think I could ever get back into the driving seat and partly to 'learn the code' as my friend Simmi said. I found a female instructor, that was the first hurdle jumped and yes, I understand the different mindset. And my instructor said to me that out of all her students, I was the one who could actually drive, but I was the only one who didn't go out on the road alone. She pointed to the car in front.
'You have no idea whether that person has a licence,' she said.

So I have one more degree of acceptance here. An irony - had I gone to live in Ontario or many other of the Provinces I would have been able to just swap my UK licence for a Canadian one. Had I gone to a rural area of BC for my test, it seems I would have had a 15 minute test to check that I could 'control the car', been asked how long I'd been driving and been given a licence.

And the positive? Well I've lost a couple of pounds and learned more techniques to bring down my blood pressure. I have taken this opportunity to look long and hard inside my own head. Kevin has reassessed his own driving during the whole process, a process which has been an incredible strain for both of us but which we have survived and grown through.
Oh, and I have discovered that however much I worship the coffee chain of Tim Hortons, their hot chocolate is too sweet for human consumption.