Thirty quid buys you coffee, an hour of theory, more coffee, an hour of town driving, a greasy fry-up, two hours of country roads, then back for a lecture on locking your bike up properly, coffee, and a PowerPoint slideshow of gruesome fatalities before the certificates were dished out. Greater biking ability and increased confidence: priceless.
It turns out that I have spot-on rear but lousy forward observation skills - just call me Epimetheus - and I need to keep my eye on the end of the bend in order to avoid threepenny-bitting.
I was the only woman on the course and the only scooterist, thus single-handedly cutting out all the jokes the instructors were planning to make about women and scooters. (It's fun to watch policemen - sorry, police officers - be all politically correct; they had to keep substituting 'your significant other' for 'the wife'.)
Hot tip: the Met has been asked to crack down on PTWs going the wrong way round traffic islands. Not that I do that, of course.
Not since a burly motorcycle cop caught me at it round New Cross Gate a couple of years back and bollocked me so severely I cried, anyway.
