What you need is a distraction

Many people have noted, in the past, that I quite like to drive fast. There have been occasions when I drove stupidly fast, and have been damn lucky not to lose my licence thus far. Much of this was because of silly time games that I used to play in my head – well, if I’m here seven minutes into the journey I need to speed up to be there by ten and then I’m in with a chance of being home in a record breaking seventeen… sort of thing.

This behaviour is probably not quite what nanny intended, and nanny has spent quite a lot of time and effort in changing the behaviour of people like me. In my case, this was wasted. All of the scary ads, all of the fucking hole-in-the-wall penalty point ads, several penalty points, one or two scary moments didn’t seem to slow me down.

However, something has slowed me down considerably over the last year or so. And it did so my allowing me to play more number games.

May I present to you a dashboard readout remarkably similar to the one found in Abby:

picture taken by somebody else

The bit in blue is the trip, which I reset every time I fill the tank with fuel.

The bit in red is an estimation of the miles left before the tank is empty.

My boring, and disappointingly unwasteful, new game is to add those two numbers and see just how much I can get out of a tank. This means no racing away from the lights, and no more late night trips down the M2 at 112, and as little as possible in blue route traffic.

The target is to make the blue box and the red box total more than 400, which would get me through around three weeks. And, as a bonus, it means that I travel the motorway at around 72, rather than the 95ish that got the Mercedes in front of me pulled over last night…

2 thoughts on “What you need is a distraction

  1. You can link it if you want, but I was doing this from the day I got the new car. And back then fuel was about 2 and 6 if I recall correctly…

    No, I am not an eco-mentalist, nor am in in Fiends of the Earth. Apparently they wouldn’t have me even if I wanted to be one.

    *sniff*

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