It’s Not Me, It’s You!: Impossible perfectionist, 27, seeks very very very tidy woman. Jon Richardson

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СКАЧАТЬ because my SkyPlus recording system means that my television is now more reliable than any girlfriend I have ever had. In the days when you had to ask a partner to record Match of the Day for you, a really good one might remember nine times out of ten, but there would always be a time when they forgot, or couldn’t find a tape, or the time it had come on ten minutes earlier because there was no lottery so they missed the first match (the best match) because they were still watching Four Weddings and a Funeral on the other side. But with modern technology, one press of a button ensures that whatever the day, whatever the time, your favourite shows are always waiting for you and nothing is ever expected of you in return. If my television could make me a cup of tea in the morning and put it by my bed, and could drive me home from the pub when I am drunk, I would marry it instantly – though I might need to get a coaxial attachment for my penis. The TV really is enormous; stupidly large, given the size of my living room. I can never quite get far back enough to see what’s on all of it, but it’s good for watching football on. You can see why I would become so afraid of the thought of losing it all through sheer carelessness. Those feelings have now subsided.

      Aside from having to concentrate on not having an accident caused by the lunacy of some drivers, I find driving to be an incredibly relaxing experience. I never feel more free than when behind the wheel of my car. It is only our autopilot that makes us turn left where we are supposed to and take the correct exit at a roundabout. The truth is that every time you get into your car there are an almost infinite number of possibilities open to you, and it is now possible to drive from the northernmost tip of Scotland to China and therefore anywhere in between! When you realise that this is possible, you cannot help but ask how many decisions you actually make in your life. By a decision made, I mean a conscious effort to take control of a situation rather than simply allowing yourself to respond in what you think is the correct way, given your track record and how you are perceived by the people around you.

      Compared with this number, then ask yourself how many things just seem to happen? How many times have you got to work and been unable to remember quite how you got there, or gone through an entire week of your brief life without feeling as though you have done anything significant? In order to be absolutely sure that where you are going is the right choice you first have to consider and discount every other option available to you at that point. Would going to Tuscany make you happier than going to Asda? Would it make you happier in the short term but create problems in the long term, or is it a viable option for a permanent relocation? What about Munich? Of course you don’t do this; no one can live their life according to this set of guidelines or none of us would get anything done for spending our time thinking about the alternatives, but isn’t the very fact that there are that many alternatives in itself a wonderfully refreshing thought? Sometimes it can seem as if there are none, when in fact nothing could be further from the truth. You just have to wake yourself up to noticing them, but most of us don’t.

      I know that while I am almost certain to end up at my gig in Yorkshire, if I were to just keep on not taking the correct turn then I would be bound to end up somewhere unexpected. From the age of ten I remember being driven to school by my mum and feeling a nervous cramping in my stomach, a pressure that existed precisely because I had always been academically very successful up until that point. I had always done well in tests and exams, behaved well and done all my homework but even then to me that just meant that the one day it all collapsed around me everybody would laugh at me all the more. Teachers would be more disappointed in me than anyone else.

       We thought you were one of the good ones, but you aren’t. You’ve let us all down by forgetting that calculator. What a pity.

      There were brief moments of escapism from that tension inside me every few hundred yards though, brought on by the thought that one day my mum would look at me and my sister and say: ‘Look, I don’t want to go to work, you don’t want to go to school, so shall we just head off? I’m going to keep on going straight ahead and if you feel like we should take a turn, tell me and we will. We’ll just stop when we get hungry and nobody will ever be able to find us again.’

      I think I could see that urge too, in her eyes, but whatever pressures were on me, a ten-year-old boy, to do what was expected of me, they must have been on her, a college head of department with two children, a hundred times over. How do we build these lives for ourselves? It was right to stay; that’s what people do – they don’t just run away as appealing as it may seem for a brief moment.

      To this day, in the back of my car I keep a sleeping bag beside a shoebox containing a box of cereal bars, a bottle of red wine (with a screw top – you only make that mistake once) and a pot noodle – my own emergency kit should I one day have the courage to drive myself somewhere new, where nobody knows where I am, and start hiding from the world. This is hardly the same as burning all my savings and hitchhiking my way into the Canadian wilderness, but I like to think of myself in some small way as a part of what I call the Boot Generation. All we need is the air in our lungs, the wind in our hair, and the dried noodle snack we can have when we eventually find a kettle and a plug socket. The man can’t keep us down!

      I glance down at the dashboard to check whether I have enough petrol to get me where I need to go, as I do roughly every five minutes or so, but I still have over two-thirds of a tank. I have seen so many films in which drivers glance down and see the needle edging into the red that I live in constant fear of that moment, because as we all know, that is when the murderer appears behind you.

      I remind myself that I am not a Hollywood film star, nor am I a dippy student, driving across the Australian outback in a beaten up old car I bought from a gaptoothed simpleton having completed my final exams. I am driving a silver Ford Fiesta across England and I filled my car up at a local supermarket, gaining reward points in the process. I think this might make the world’s dullest Hollywood movie, but that’s fine with me. At this thought, a car whose driver wants to exit at the upcoming junction, but not enough to pay attention to how close it is, meanders across the motorway without indicating and pulls into the space I had left in front of me. Other people brake and swerve to avoid him but go no further, but I waste no time in slamming on my horn and when I can see his eyes meet mine in his rear-view mirror I proudly extend my middle finger towards him. Only once this has been done do I stop to think about how big he might be, or how many other people might be with him. A mist descends when I am in my car, something to do with being encased in metal I suspect, which makes me feel less like a small, scrawny man and more like Robocop. I doubt Robocop would have had the commercial success he did had his voice been as camp as my car horn, but it is the only gesture I have to make.

      There has been a slow and steady shift away from the traditional Highway Code over recent years, so gradual that most people haven’t even realised it has happened. While the key points remain the same in that we drive on the left and go clockwise around roundabouts, most of the smaller ‘rules’ as they were known back then have changed and been replaced by guidelines. For the uninitiated, here are a few of the main alterations to the things you may have been taught when learning to drive which make up the brand new Mighway Code:

      1. Roundabouts: When approaching a roundabout, be advised that whichever direction you intend to travel in, the correct lane is always the one in which there are the fewest other cars. Once at the front of the queue, note that if you wait every time you see a car coming, you will never get anywhere. The thirty-second rule states that if you have been waiting for thirty seconds or more, you must move out immediately and other road users are legally obliged to make space for you. If, through no fault of your own, you miss your turning on a roundabout, be aware that simply going round once more, though it may only take a few seconds, will pump unwanted noxious gasses into an already suffocated atmosphere. You must do whatever you can to get across the traffic as soon as possible and back on course, reversing if needed.

      2. Signalling: Indicating is a dangerous procedure since it involves removing your hands from the wheel and draws your attention away from driving safely. It should be avoided at all times (for exceptions see rule 3) as not only does it reduce СКАЧАТЬ