Stopping Distance

I am looking forward to my witch training at the Nature Park today. We are preparing early for Halloween. Out in the fields, the pumpkins are being harvested. Last week when I was leaving the park a snake slithered across by path, I'm sure this has some deeper significance, just that I don't know what. I wonder if I'll be able to ride a broomstick by the end of the autumn, after all, we do have those red and white mushrooms in the Park.

You know when you unlock something and all the tumblers fall into place? And then sometimes you have a moment when you can almost hear them going click, click, click in your head? Well I had one of those moments this morning. I have to get my head around things and really understand them, and then eventually it becomes intuitive, whatever 'it' is.
I have really been having difficulty 'getting' the difference between the underlying driving philosophies between Britain and BC and this morning, something fell into place with a click, click, click.
Kevin said something about someone crashing into the back of you, and it was a comment he must have made many times before, but this time, the penny dropped, and it explained so much to me.
In Britain, we have the concept of 'stopping distance'. You have to leave enough room between you and the car in front to allow you to stop in an emergency. Because of this, driver training and testing includes an emergency stop and we are taught to calculate stopping distances in different weather conditions. But here, although you have to leave a gap between you and the car in front, in normal driving conditions on normal roads this is a two second gap.
It is the stopping distance, that explains, suddenly, several differences in philosophy.
The idea here, that drives me insane, that you always have to worry that the person behind you might be confused by what you are doing even though you are clearly signalling etc., the idea that a person can just slot in front of you, the notion that you have to go full charge at a traffic light - again in case the person behind you doesn't slow. All of this I now see is because we don't here have the notion of stopping distance.

Now in general, I have no problem here with my own distance, because as I have said so many times before, all I have to do is keep to the speed limit and no-one else is anywhere near me - in front - but behind me, this doesn't apply.

The stopping distance shifts the responsibility. If someone is signalling that they are turning and for some reason you are not sure they are going to do that, (the main bugbear here seems to be what they term 'over-caution') then it doesn't matter, because you have sufficient stopping distance. At lights, in Britain, there is an obligation to not allow yourself to be in the position where you can't stop anyway, 'don't be an amber gambler' but again, if someone did stop unexpectedly, so could you.
And of course, click, click, click, the reason we Brits go mad when someone cuts in front of us, whereas here it is totally accepted as being ok, is that the person who cuts in is cutting our stopping distance. I really don't know why this has taken me so long to get, but now I can understand the underlying idea, I can see how it all works.

Last night, watching 'Life on Mars' again, more memorabilia of the 70's. The Watney's party seven, the huge ten pound notes. The sexism - pin-ups of half clothed women - in the workplace. Everyone smoking in the workplace. Free's 'Wishing Well' playing in the background. At one point, Inspector Tyler, who is again near the surface of the stretched skin of the coma reality his mind has created, is sleeping next to an old TV set with the Test Card and the white noise. The girl from the Test Card comes out of the box and talks to him. And that's without the awful clothes we used to wear.

But there was one piece of 70's memoribilia that I read this morning that didn't come from 'Life on Mars', was an article about the Goodies' Bill Oddie. Who doesn't remember them on their three-person bike ? I loved them.
It's sad that Bill Oddie had a breakdown, but he seems to have remained in the public eye one way or another. I wonder what happened to Tim Brooke-Taylor.

Ok, broomstick class, I wonder if witches have stopping distance, they probably just have to cackle loudly and all will be well.