“Take the Third Exit from the Roundabout and Curse the Fact that You Cannot Count Whilst Driving…”

I am a decent, relatively confident driver – solid and reliable is the summit of my aspirations – but driving would never make it into my list of favourite things to do.  I drive because I have to.  I take no pleasure in it.  I love where I live, but driving is a necessity for all but a trip to the local Co-op or a walk around the cemetery.  The practicalities are straightforward enough and I am competent and safe – I am a clipboard carrying man in a hard hat and steel capped boots – but I don’t believe I have ever got into the driving seat thinking, “well, this should be fun.”  Put me behind the wheel of a car bearing supermarket-bound wife and two child-seated grandchildren whose tablet batteries have run out and my ennui takes on the proportions of an AI-controlled articulated truck in a snow storm.

It’s not actually as much about driving, as it is about drivers: it seems to me that approximately half the country’s population are brain-dead prats and every single one of them drives a car.  Badly.  Tin soldiers encased in steel; flat-track bullies in armoured casings.

There should be an entire branch of psychology dedicated solely to drivers.  There is something deeply tribal going on here.  Close to where I live is a village.  In this place no driver ever acknowledges another who stops to wave them through; voluntarily give up your right of way and you will be met with stony indifference.  It is an attitude that I have only ever fully witnessed in that one small place.  It is a startlingly localized phenomenon.  Is it passed from instructor to pupil, from mother to daughter, from father to son, from dickhead to dickhead?  Are they like it out of the car?  It must be fun queuing in the village chippy, it must be a happy place to walk the baby through the park.

And this is no backwoods, hillbilly community.  It is a fairly large village full of shops, pubs, coffee shops, community centres and even a library, just five minutes out of the city.  This is not the setting of ‘Deliverance’.  It is a localized peccadillo.

Peccadilloes are, of course, something that almost all drivers have.  Certain ways of doing things, certain attitudes that that we carry on our sleeves like Cub Scout badges.  The UK is an island chockfull of roundabouts (the traffic circle kind, not the painted wooden horses) and my own personal bugbear is drivers who do not bloody signal before taking the exit immediately prior to the one I am patiently sitting at, prat-like, expecting them to go straight on.  I impotently yell ‘Signal!’ but to absolutely no avail.  I then sit for approximately three hours whilst every single vehicle on the road exits at the same turn without bloody signalling.  Eventually someone will signal left, but they will actually go straight on…  There is not a single driver on the roads in the UK who does not believe that every other driver is a complete bozo.  “Why’s he doing that?  Look, look, he’s doing it again.  What is he playing at?  He’s just an accident waiting to happen.”  To be fair, most of us do not believe that we are the best driver in the world, just that we are better than everybody else.

I tend to be very aware of my own limitations (which are, in fact, virtually limitless) and consequently spend much time actively attempting not to piss-off other drivers.  I drive (more or less) to the speed limit and (more or less) to the road conditions.  I signal my intentions in advance of my manoeuvres.  I do not even touch my mobile phone whilst driving.  I never eat Kentucky Fried Chicken.  (Ever!)  Having driven for nigh-on fifty years, preferring on almost all occasions to drive into a parking space even if it is a bus journey away from my eventual destination (I instinctively feel more comfortable moving forward) I have recently discovered that I have a real aptitude for parallel parking in the tightest of spaces, providing – and here’s the rub – that I slot into the gap at the first attempt.  If I get it even slightly wrong I feel obliged to drive away, sell the car and assume a new identity in another town.  A second attempt is always going to be worse and the exact same people will still be watching.

I once traded in a car at a local dealership and, having carefully looked over it, the salesman said, “The bodywork is flawless.  Are you one of those people who park in the empty bit of the car park, miles away from the store, just to make sure that nobody bumps your car?”  I answered, truthfully, “No.  I am one of those people who parks in the empty bit of the car park because it is easier to find a bay that I can get into without driving backwards.  Give me forward motion every time.”  He laughed.  He thought I was joking.  I wasn’t.

I adhere to my opinion that I am a competent and safe driver.  I drive because I have to, not because I want to, and even though I am almost certainly better at it than just about everybody else I know, I would probably prefer not to be…