Primary position

All that was missing was my beret, mac and the effeminate screech of Bettyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy before impact.

hehe. Brilliant (not the fall).

A weird thing happened to me last week in Hackney, I came out of our road and turned left into a really busy road with fast moving traffic so I kept to a good secondary position to allow it to go by. I needed to go right quite a long way down the road and looked back to check what was coming before signalling/moving out and got the shock of my life that a massive white van was less than a metre from by back wheel (he wasn't there last time I'd looked), he could easily go past but was intent on making a point I guess? He started honking when I looked right into his eye which I thought would humanise me. I felt trapped because I needed to maneuver across/stop to turn but was worried he'd plough right into me. My friend who'd ridden ahead came back to see what was going on and banged on his window, the guy jumped out the van and started screaming "What the fuck is your problem?" at me. I was shell shocked and didn't say anything. The two guys began to argue and the driver tried to headbutt my friend(!) before driving off. My friend then started shouting at me saying I should NEVER ride in the secondary position and I began to cry (out of anger I suppose) because well it's my goddamn job to teach people how to ride safely on the road! There is nowhere near the amount of cyclists in Birmingham and cars have no idea how to treat us but I rarely encounter aggression such as this yet in London where bikes are so abundant now, I encounter aggression quite often...it's quite interesting. I feel like when I move to London/if I teach here I will have to adapt how I teach to take into consideration alot of differences.

On a separate note, since training over a year ago now, I've never once been offered a meeting with other instructors or my boss/further training from the ITO. I usually read about changes and developments here or from CTUK directly and it frustrates me as I think it would be good to talk things like this through. The communication is frankly very poor. Further to the above incident, I then spent the rest of the day questioning myself, I always ride in the primary position when it's safe to do so but feel like I should also act sensibly and not block the roads when I'm going slower. I teach the syllabus exactly as it says on this topic but it seems like different instructors have different opinions on this...I know some instructors who NEVER take up primary except when turning and others who are adamant that you should all the time.