Bunking off from school/playing truant/hooky

[WOM]

Further to the driver training thing, I was in a car (brand new VW Rabbit) with two stoner idiots (picture Wayne and Garth) who bunked off the first three weeks of in-car training. So instead of driving for 1 of 3 hours, I drove the whole night long and knocked off my in-car portion in a month. The trainer was a bit of a music freak and we just drove all over Toronto talking music and travel. "Yeah, I mean the thing about Genesis...turn right here....is when Gabriel left the band....now left here....Collins picked up and...".

[ursus arctos]

North Americans can struggle to understand how relatively expensive it is to keep a car in Europe.

Just as Europeans can struggle to understand how absolutely essential having one is in much of North America.

[WOM]

I remember staring at the gas prices in France on our honeymoon and wondering what miscalculation I'd made to come up with $80 for a tank in a tiny Fiat. "Surely I've converted a Franc wrong or dropped a decimal point." Nope....$80 in 1999.

[Jah Womble]

When we started at college, my friend George was the only guy on the course with a car. Poor fellow was constantly ferrying people to and from somewhere or other in his beaten-up Avenger.

As WOM intimates, the entire culture over here is very different from North America, obviously. I live in the capital and probably have fewer than half a dozen close friends that own or run cars: even then, the majority choose not to drive in London - which makes complete sense given the public transportation options available. (For example, I have two tube stations, a mainline station, cab offices and buses all within minutes of my front door.)

When I visit my best friend in LA, I'm nearly always struck by the barely-concealed dismissal of public transport most residents seem to hold. Looking at the pall hanging over the city makes me wonder how and why that attitude still persists.

[Janik]

And anyway there weren't any places to park one

That was true not that many miles away or years later, but there were definitely some cars belonging to sixth formers that got squeezed into spaces in the side streets near my school. There was normally someone who could give you a lift of a lunchtime if you wanted it (obviously being proud to show off their wheels), though whether it ever got to double figures in total is dubious.
I would guess more than half already had licences before they left. Well more than that were at least learning to drive.

[Lang Spoon]

Yeah I’m a cack handed outlier that failed my test and never learned how to drive. Most of 5th and 6th year passed their test before leaving school. But fuck all had their own cars in 93-94.

[Bored Of Education]

I remember the only kid that drove a car at our school stole them. Indeed, he once stole a teacher's car. Thinking about it, I am not sure that our school was as good as I remember.

[Heliotrope]

Is the word "bunking" used regionally? I wonder because that's what it was called in my high school. I was reading the book Albion's Seed earlier this year, and the author's premise is that the culture in four regions of colonial America was influenced by the different places in Britain where most of their settlers came from. In this area's case, they were supposedly from the northern Midlands and Yorkshire, though Quakerism had a lot to do with things, too.