I have been toying for some time now with the idea of Learning to Drive. Actually, I have been toying with the idea for two decades. Make that three: How time flies.
But I am reaching a milestone birthday this year, and this conceptual plaything became more tangible when I saw a glint in Anna's eye that suggested the formulation of a new challenge for yours truly. Truth to tell, I’ve always had a funny relationship with cars. On my first day at nursery school, having chosen the butterfly coat hanger on which to hang my infant duffle coat, I disdained the model garage that all the other little boys were playing with and instead made a beeline for the suburban dollhouse that the girls were clustered around.
Don’t get me wrong: In later life I’ve always enjoyed being driven, the getting from A to B deliciously unruffled and perfectly combobulated. But for years it didn't occur to me to actually And why on earth would it? Missing all the visual stimulation as I focused on the dreary tarmac'ed aspect ahead, ever alert to careless pedestrians or bounding deer. Oh, dear me, no.
No, indeed. My inability to transfer a backseat mind-set to a driving-seat one was proven when I availed myself of the civic bicycle-rental plan in Paris a few years ago, and found myself so busy craning to look through tantalizingly half-drawn apartment curtains in pretty eighteenth-century buildings and the crowded windows of fascinating that I shot up the middle of one-way streets and once smacked pa.
