That was my attitude as well but the problem, especially with cars, is that you take a test when you are in your teens, and then are let loose with a two ton metal people crusher, and never expected to take another test for the rest of your life. About 25 years ago, I was at a track day driving my M Roadster and there was an IAM caravan there offering free assessments of one's driving. I thought it would be fun to have someone tell me how good a driver I was. Ha! I was absolutely pulled to pieces, including the ultimate humiliation of being told I wasn't going fast enough (was dawdling along at 48 mph in a 60 zone).

Me too.

So I signed up and for several months each Sunday would go out with a different observer. One drive almost ended the wrong way when the observer said he wanted me to turn the car to face the opposite direction, and to use the handbrake. I thought he meant a handbrake turn.

When I took my bike and car tests in the 1960s, road signs were not so well thought out, and I had taken to ignoring them and instead reading the road, so consequently missed much information. My hazard awareness was also very low. Some of the car things were nitpicking, such as not allowing the handbrake to ratchet (had to hold the button in). They were also insistent upon the 'block change' where you stay in a high gear when approaching a roundabout and then only at the last moment change from say, fifth gear to first or second. But by the time I took the test I had changed to a car with a 'sequential manual gearbox' in which you had no choice but to go through the gears which annoyed some of the more anal observers. I also got special dispensation from IAM Head Office to take the test using my left foot for brake which is how I drive autos and SMG boxes.

Learning to signal instead of indicating was hard to swallow. The IAM method is as you approach a junction you start to check mirrors *very carefully* well in advance, get prepared for the junction, check again for other traffic, pedestrians, etc., and then ONLY signal is there is someone around who would benefit from your signal. "But what if there's someone I haven't seen?" was my objection and was told "Then that shows you've not checked carefully enough."

So yes, all these years later I don't blindly indicate, instead I selectively signal. And I try to time the signal so it only flashes eight times before I start to take the turn at which point I manually cancel the signal—useful training for when you have a bike that doesn't automatically cancel signals.

I recognised how my driving had improved, so when I took up biking again in 2005 I signed up for the bike version of the IAM course and this time it was a single observer all the way through, who happened to be my Police Inspector neighbour and ex-police motorcyclist. I can hand-on-heart say he is probably the reason I am still alive now, as he taught me so much on the hazard awareness, road positioning, counter steering and other fronts.

What I didn't expect is that the training raised my biking enjoyment level as well. In the meantime, Roadcraft should be required reading.

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"For sheer delight there is nothing like altitude; it gives one the thrill of adventure
and enlarges the world in which you live," Irving Mather (1892-1966)