High school drop-ins

The Man and I went back to school today, for our mandatory five-hour learner driver course.

It was held in a classroom at the local high school, and all but one of our twenty-seven fellow 'students' were aged 16. What a strange time-travelling experience... The teenagers looked at us as if we were aliens, not imagining that we might once have been teenagers ourselves (not that I ever was, to be honest. The no-sense-of-fun thing goes back a long way with me. And come to think of it, strictly speaking they are right, we are actually aliens. Legal ones, of course. But now I'm rambling).

Anyway, it's a very long time since the Man or I have taken a class that opened with a lecture on acceptable classroom behaviour. We all duly behaved ourselves.

The teacher was good, and the hours went by pretty painlessly. A whole hour devoted to why you should wear a seatbelt seemed a bit excessive, but apparently a lot of Americans still disregard the laws on this one. In fact there is still no adult seatbelt law at all in New Hampshire - the 'Live Free or Die' state. Maybe they should change that motto to Live Free and Die.

There was also a long session on DWI (Driving While Intoxicated), where we learnt that on weekends at night one in ten drivers on the road is over the limit, which is rather a sobering statistic. This contributes greatly to the fact that over 50,000 Americans are killed in road accidents every year - that and all the people not wearing seatbelts.

We were finally dismissed at 8:30pm, and headed off to the car-park, where we watched our classmates being collected by their moms and dads as we revved up our engine. Our own kids were in the care of the Exiles - thank you! - so we picked them up and brought them home to bed.