Like 85% of all drivers, I am above average. My finely tuned driving skills (i.e. driving at 36mph in a 30mph zone) meant I had to spend an afternoon at what is notionally known in the UK as Naughty Drivers Club. You get caught speeding and are given a choice: accept three penalty points on your driving licence, or attend a Naughty Drivers Club workshop so you can learn why speeding is a bad thing.

Deep down, I kind of already knew that driving too fast is a bad thing. Even if it is 2am and everyone else is asleep. That said, my expectations for a knowledge-packed telling-off by the Police were not high. I was wrong.

My first learning, when I entered a classroom with twenty-three other Naughty Drivers, was that 16 of us had been caught at precisely the same speed-trap. This suggested to me that rather than being a road-safety device, the speed-trap was in actual fact a money-grabbing scheme by the local council.

My second learning came closer to the end of the session when we were shown a one-minute drivers-eye video of a car being driven through a semi-urban scene and asked to record how many potential dangers we could see.

The clip started.
There was a young mother walking along the side of the road with a toddler.
They were approaching a junction.
Along the side of the road there were rows of bins, put out ready for collection.
There was another junction.
There was a car parked on a double-yellow line on the other side of the road. The road was wide enough for two vehicles, but not three. Two cars were approaching behind the parked car. The driver looked like he was waiting to get out of the car.
A sign said, ‘School ahead, 20mph speed limit when lights are flashing’. The lights were flashing.
Another junction. This time with a car waiting to join the traffic.
A cat sat on a garden wall.
The school. Various parents milling around outside.
More flashing lights.
A lollipop-woman poised to step in to the road.
A man with a dog on a long lead walking towards her.

You get the picture.

When the video finished, the Naughty Drivers Club instructor asked us to total up the number of danger points we had identified.

I let a bit guilty because I lost my concentration towards the end and only found 34.

The woman sat next to me stuck her hand up, ‘twelve,’ she announced.
Everyone else joined in. Lots of sixes. Lots of sevens. A few tens. Another twelve.
Then someone shouted out ‘eighteen’.
Everyone looked at him. The instructor smiled, ‘what do you do for a living, sir?’
‘Coach driver’, the man answered. One of the sixteen of us that had kindly decided to give the local council some free money.

I stayed quiet. For a few seconds I thought I must be going mad.

Then the instructor replayed the video. Only this time he gave us the benefit of his commentary while a colleague kept count. By the end of the video the official count total was thirty-two.

I wasn’t going mad.

Everyone else was. That or they were all walking through life in a trance.

And that’s my point. If professional drivers are missing almost half of the hazards around them, and if the average driver is missing three-quarters, then it shouldn’t be a great surprise that we’re all held up behind an ever-increasing spiral of road accidents. Modern life is turning us into mindless idiots.

Now I’ve got thirty five things to worry about. Thirty six if you count the fact the instructor continued to deny the cat sat on the wall was a hazard.