I survived my cliff top adventure!

I hung on to the branch with all my might.Hanging over the top of a very steep cliff was petrifying...I mean that as it sounds...I was petrified...it was as if I had been turned to stone. I couldn't move a muscle. Hearing but blocking out the instructions to let go and heave myself over the top.

"Trust me." he kept saying. I knew he could be trusted but fear had such a grip over me I just ceased to function. "Breathe." he said...This command actually got through to my frozen brain. I started to try and calm myself with deep breathing...it began to work...and I started to see reason and come back to reality.

"Have you seen the angle you're at?" he asked with amusement. All I knew is that my entire body had become one tense muscle, leaning forward as far as it would go for fear of tipping the balance. " Look at how tight your grip is!" he observed.

"Of course it's tight!" I told him "I'm teetering on the top of a cliff, that is my branch I'm holding!"

" You're going to put a dent in my steering wheel if you hold it any tighter."

Okay now I slightly relaxed...only slightly though.

In the end he talked me out of my frozen posture and I managed to heave the both of us over that cliff as you will no doubt realise seeing as this is in the past tense, and if I had still been there in that rigid state I would have never been able to let go to do a spot of touch typing to update my blog!

Well that is how my driving lesson ended yesterday. If I wrote it like a drama, that's because it felt like a drama! The cliff was a junction at the top of a very steep and long hill ( can you have a long hill I wonder? ). For some reason the small amount of sanity I posess went completely out of the window. I say for some reason, well perhaps the reason was there was a rather nice car parked behind me and even though my dodgy clutch control probably only caused me to roll back inches I had vivid visions of rolling back and smashing into said parked car.

In spite of this ridiculous hiccup at the last post I think I had improved over all. We went out to the "big city", and I coped with several lanes of traffic on busy roundabouts...I also drove through what looked like a decidedly dodgy area and had a run down on what had been going on there the week before, which had the desired effect of me keeping my speed up so we could make good our escape before any of it happened to us ( well that was what was going through my mind...I don't DO cities! ). On the way back I asked if I could have a medal, he declined my request but upped my score on roundabouts. I now have 3/5 on roundabouts.

Oh I forgot to say that I cut my eyeball ... so I embarked on my lesson in a less than calm state, taking my bag with me this time just in case it worsened and I had to drive to the doc's surgery half way through my lesson ( who knows? Eyes are weird things ). Mr patience personified has told me before that your state of mind will affect your driving so I choose to believe that little mishap earlier that morning may indeed have had a knock on effect when I got behind the wheel...who knows?

What I do know is that Mr Patience never lets me off the hook for anything. He informed me that next lesson will have lots of hills, though he did say maybe slightly gentler ones to get my confidence up...I think the hills are okay, it's just gravity that scares me!

Doxie, onward and upwards! :o)