See You In Hell Winter!

This weekend has been so beautiful. 20 degree heat on both Saturday and Sunday, and it meant that we were able to get some jobs done in the garden and enjoy the sun together.

At the front of the house, we finally painted the wooden beam above our front door. I say "we", but that actually means Sam because I was too short to reach the bloody thing! I bought some black outdoor paint last Summer when we moved in but we never got around to painting it for one reason or another.

In the back garden, we've started to prep for a bug-friendly garden. We've put a bee hotel up on the fence in the sunniest part of the garden in the hopes of attracting leaf cutter bees or other bee varieties, and we've moved some bricks into place in the opposite corner ready to build a bug hotel as soon as I can bring home some wooden pallets from one of our sites. The plan is to have 3 pallets in total stacked on top of each other using the bricks - each section underneath a pallet will then be filled with things like pinecones, bamboo sticks, plantpots etc, ready for any potential guests to move in.

Once we got all of that out of the way, we spent the rest of the weekend desperately trying to get some colour back into our pale skin. Penny has been happy, switching from sunning herself with some ice cubes to rolling in the dirt to cool off. It's been good to wear something short-sleeved for a change instead of being wrapped up in 3 layers and a jumper!

We've also managed to fit in more driving practise for me, a hands-free dog walk for Penny (with our new waist belt/dog lead investment), and - on my part - some shameless selfies because I felt cute as fuck...at least until I went outside and was forced back into my ugly squint by the sun.

Say Hello to the Broommobile!

Over a month has passed since I started my driving lessons and I've come a long way already.

I picked everything up really quickly and I was out on the main roads within 4 hours, and I felt confident enough after my second lesson to buy my first ever car!

The Broommobile

Here she is. I went down the finance route to avoid eating into my mortgage deposit or my savings, and the dealership delivered it from Bolton to my door.

I was keen to buy a car before passing my test so that I can get used to the clutch on this car as I'm learning in my instructor's car.

Speaking of instructors, I've already had to change to another one already. I was wary of going with a male instructor, as I'm not very comfortable around men that I don't know, but I put my prejudices to one side and decided to give it a try. 

Within 20 minutes of my first lesson, however, I felt uncomfortable. My instructor told that "women always struggle with the clutch, it's just not natural to them" - fair enough I thought, until he went on to say it's "unnatural to them - it would be like you going out to work whilst your boyfriend stays home to have the babies"...

Fabulous start.

I didn't like that, but I thought maybe I was just being over-sensitive and carried on with my lessons, but every lesson, there would be at least one thing he said or did that annoyed me.

At the end of my first lesson, he cancelled another pupil's lesson to clear a space for me even though I told him not to. His justification was that I'm a good student and that the boy whose lesson he'd cancelled was "no good anyway, he can wait". 

In one lesson he told me that he had favourite students who he always prioritised over his other students - innocent enough, until he started referring to me and these mystery students as his "special students" and told me that he always cancelled other lessons for us. 

In another lesson, he said he liked that I don't wear makeup. I pointed out that I was wearing concealer, eyebrow pencil & powder, eyeliner and mascara, and he then went on to say that it wasn't as much as one student who "got in the car on her first lesson and made me so happy - she was beautiful! But then in her next lesson she wore no makeup and I asked her where her daughter had gone and who this was, and she didn't like that. I felt like she had lied to me. I feel like women deceive me when they wear makeup and hide their face from me".

Once when I asked him whether I should stop or just slow down after a woman didn't stop behind an obstruction on her side, he replied with He also commented that "yes slow down, because it is a woman, and woman + woman = accident".

It sounds ridiculous to type it out, you're probably thinking that I'm just overreacting, and I probably am, but to be in a confined space like a car with a stranger under the pressure of driving safely as a learner, you don't really need the distraction of a man making sexist jokes in your ear.

Add in the fact that he never taught me to check blind spots when overtaking parked cars or changing lanes (only when pulling off from a kerb), and that he would take his hands off the wheel when he was driving, and I just started to dread my driving lessons. I spent more time feeling annoyed by his comments or behaviour than learning anything new. 

Now that I can go out in my car and practise with Sam, I thought it was the perfect time to change instructor, so this morning, I called the driving school to ask for a female instructor. I didn't ring to complain, and I didn't badmouth my instructor, but when the lady on the phone asked me why I wanted to switch instructors and I told her, she insisted that the company have to raise it as a complaint because of the nature of his comments and the fact that he was getting me to stop at the shop for him and flouting the company's policies and procedures to favour his "special" students.

They didn't have any female instructors, so I changed to another driving school who do, and my first lesson is on Wednesday. I didn't think anything else of my previous instructor until the lady called me back and advised that he was denying the comments and cancelling lessons. I wouldn't have been bothered if he'd tried to suggest that I was just taking things the wrong way, but the fact that he flat-out denied everything is a bit annoying. I told her that I wasn't interested in pursuing a complaint though - I don't want to ruin the guy's career just because I found him a bit irritating - so she just said that they would investigate internally.

In the meantime, Sam and I have been tootling around Nottingham in my car, maybe 5-10 miles at a time, and I'm doing well. I feel like I've nailed the basics, but I'll need a few more lessons to neaten out any bad habits and to improve the skills I've already got.

I've bought myself a basic AA road kit and I've found the perfect cubby holes for my sunglasses and phone for when I'm driving. I still feel like I've got a long way to go, but I'm looking forward to driving lessons again now that I've changed to a new instructor, and hopefully it won't be long until I'm out on the roads on my own!

My baby on the driveway