The Trouble With Styling It Out – The Art of Getting It Wrong

A few years ago, I found myself boarding a coach which would take me back home from a thoroughly enjoyable day trip I'd had to Cambridge. The coach I'd be taking had driven up from Ipswich, and was fairly full of passengers. I got on, and immediately proceeded to doing what everyone does when they enter any form of public transport: scan along the entire vehicle, searching for 2 empty seats in the attempt to enjoy the journey without having to sit next to anyone.

Sadly, I wasn't blessed with any such luck on this particular day – so I plonked myself down next to a woman at the front. While she may have looked extremely tired, that was only a result of her already having endured 2 hours of Megabus's misery. She didn't have a streaming disease, and she didn't smell like yesterday's turds – all of which helped me come to the conclusion that she would be a fairly safe bet for sitting next to for the next 2 hours. But all the foresight in the world wouldn't have been able to predict what happened over the course of the journey.

No, not that – you dirty bastards! But what did happen involved us getting...rather too close.

About 20 minutes into the journey, she succumbed to the tiredness that was evident for her perpetual yawning, and in doing so, accidentally rested her head on my shoulder. The diplomatic thing to do at this point would be to gently wake her up, to inform her that she was using a stranger's shoulder as a pillow. But I didn't.

I was full of empathy for her, sympathising that she had already been on a long journey before I'd got on the coach, and an equally long road-trip lay ahead. She was engulfed by tiredness, and the only cure for that is sleep. I therefore checked for knits, made sure she wasn't a dribbler, and let her look at the inside of her eyelids for a bit. I know – I'm a fucking gentleman (!)

She slept peacefully for 30 miles, until she began to stir from her slumber. But the moment she realised that the bony-cushion that had helped her drift off was in fact a stranger's shoulder, she bounced up to attention, startled like a Deer who'd just heard a gunshot.

In the corner of my eye I saw her turn to look at me with a surprised expression plastered across her weary face. But, in order to avoid what would've been a deeply embarrassing situation, I had an ingenious brainwave that I somehow managed to put into practice in the millisecond before she locked her gaze onto me.

I quickly shut my eyes, and dropped my head to side, pretending that I too had been snoozing. Awkward crisis averted, using a technique that in the world of performance driving is called "styling it out".

The definition of styling it out is simple: it's the art of making an embarrassing mistake look deliberate. And anyone who's ever ran spectacularly out of talent when mid-drift will have at some point referred to their blunder by saying "I meant that". This is styling it out.

The point at which styling it out becomes even more masterful however is when an over-zealous drift results in more of a smokey pirouette than a spin, enabling the car to continue on its way in a straight line.

The trouble with styling it out however is that it's just essentially a very clever way of being an idiot. It's sarcasm, on wheels. It's a professional way of being unprofessional. It's an automotive way of performing the illusion we all perform in life: that of acting like we know what we're doing, when we don't.

The very concept of styling it out is one that can be applied throughout all of life, every single day, in ways that can boggle the mind when you really begin to think about it. It is a means of pulling the wool over inexperienced eyes, while those blessed with the gift of more accurate observation can see what's actually going on. But while it may be a concept fraught with trouble, it does at least give people a chance to retain their pride and dignity when in the presence of idiots. And there's a lot of them around!

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Written by: Angelo Uccello

Twitter: @AngeloUccello

Tribe: Speed Machines

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