For most of my 30 years I have been a non-driver. I am not entirely ignorant of roads, being a persistent cyclist, but I have a healthy fear of those tin boxes with wheels. Especially when they have 18 of them. So it’s taken me a fair while to pluck up enough courage to go in search of driving lessons.

Now I’m no novice to Google et al but I struggled to find out about local driving instructors, what their reputations were like (beyond their own web sites, that is, which I never judge to be impartial!) and so I made a random choice, based largely on the fact that as a student, I got discount on my first block of lessons with them. I chose the AA.

I was lucky enough to get Alexander Duncan as my driving instructor. He has the knack of reading people and working out which methods of teaching will work for which people. I was a complete nervous nellie, so he was very gentle with me. When I grew more confident, he knows how to point out mistakes without crushing that confidence. He never just tells me that I’ve done something wrong, he always explains it, and the possible consequences – which is vital for me remembering not to do it again!

I am currently doing Pass Plus with Alex, as I passed my test first time. No-one was more surprised than me, as when I look back to how terrified I was, I’ve made amazing progress and it’s all down to Alex. The personality and friendliness of your instructor is so important to how you learn. Alex is my third instructor (I did attempt learning when I was 17 but was too nervous) so I’ve seen how other people do the job. That’s why I’m writing this. He deserves to be shouted about as something special.

So, if you’re in the Berkshire, Buckinghamshire area (he mainly covers High Wycombe and surrounds but came out to Maidenhead for me) I really do recommend him. You can either ring the AA driving school and ask for Alexander Duncan as an instructor, or leave me a message here and I’ll text him. He doesn’t know I’m writing this so I don’t want to put his number all over t’interwebs!

cforms contact form by delicious:days

Hmm, says I and had a look at the source. Full of Microsoft proprietary style information. I realised pretty quickly that he’d pasted it in from a Word document. Why? I don’t know, I really don’t. I though the Wordpress WYSIWYG was pretty user-friendly. Clearly only Word is inside the comfort zone at the moment. This will change, eventually, but in the meantime, there is a hidden feature in Wordpress 2.1 (I’ve not upgraded yet!) that will make life easier for my marketing guy.

In the visual editor, hit alt-v (IE) (alt-shift-v in Firefox) and you get a sekrit menu appear, one of the options being ‘paste from Word’. So clearly he’s not alone in his clinging to Word as an editor…