Due to “domestic circumstance”, a phrase my father used time and again to the curiouser and curiouser nuns to explain my many absences from the convent classroom (it sounded better than “the clock didn’t go off”), I find myself doing a lot of driving theses days. Sometimes, it has to be said, a little impatiently and aggressively.
The other day I was behind a neat little car that was tootling along perfectly safely, minding its own business, well within the speed limit and tucked up to the solid white line. All well and good. I was late, however. The time pips were bursting out of the car radio, signalling the imminence of the hour, the bus lane was luring me like a scallop-skirted siren, and I found myself battling tears of rage.
I didn’t learn to drive a car until I was well into my 30s. My eldest son’s first word of more than one syllable was “concentrate”. As soon as I’d turned on the ignition he’d pull his bottle out of his mouth and, from the depths of his sticky car seat, shout “concentrate” at me, doubtless a response to my behind-the-wheel chant: “Can’t sing the Barney song – have to concentrate.”
Crash course
I’ve had two automobile accidents. Once, while cruising around a corner, I took the side off a car parked on a double-yellow line.
I figured the circumstances were extenuating; the policeman didn’t. It wasn’t pleasant: the frazzled woman, who had abandoned her car to pick up some equally horrified child from among dozens and dozens of others disgorged from a grey school, returned aghast, shouted at me, and rang her husband.
The second time I reversed at speed in an empty cafe car park and hit the only other car in the vicinity. A Mercedes. Such was the force of the entirely ludicrous blow that I managed to knock off the car’s registration plate. It’s okay, though; I picked it up, carried it back into the cafe and waved it around until the car owner picked herself up off the floor and came to reclaim it.
Regardless, the truth is that women are very safe drivers. Every one of them should be entrusted with their very own minister of state to chauffeur.
Anyway, despite my impotent tears, I’d like to apologise to that meditative morning driver, who was obviously in no immediate rush to get to her mindfulness class. And while I’m at it, I’d like to say to her that I really liked the crocheted tissue-box holder she had on the back window. It truly is lovely to see what people can achieve with a simple ball of cotton and an endearing lack of self-consciousness.
A new alphabet
Anyway, I was thinking about the new N for Novice plates, and wondering if there’s scope for other letters of the alphabet to get involved. Letters like M for Menopausal, or T for Touchy, or maybe RBM (Really Bad Mood) or HCMI, CYRT? (Holy Cow, Move It. Can’t You Read the Time?)
Sometimes, when traffic is really foul, I look at women sailing by on their bicycles (occasionally I glimpse them from my rearview mirror scraping the mud off their helmets and mouthing uncharitable things in my direction) and I think: “That should be me.”
It’s all part of a greater plan to take personal responsibility for my life. Damn it, I’ve walked past enough shelves of self-help titles in the airport to do a little self-diagnosis. I mean, how difficult can it be?
It’s all about time – time and planning – isn’t it? And control, of course: self-control and calorific control and remembering to moisturise and put the cat out. “Fail to prepare, prepare to fail,” my niece said to me, but actually I think she may have been talking about a guacamole recipe.
Anyway, life is going to change around here. I’m going to stop weeping over the steering wheel and buy myself a bicycle, and that’s just the start of it. I’m going to make my own tapinade, embrace felt-making, sit in a park with a Tupperware box of leftover risotto and watch the leaves fall. I’m going to jump out of bed in the morning for a glass of hot water and lemon juice and a tasty handful of blueberries, rather than crawl downstairs for half a cup of black coffee, a stale pop tart and a groggy search for the car keys.
“You’re a donkey on the edge,” a friend said to me last night, which was kind of touching, if somewhat obtuse.
I’ll be a donkey on two wheels before you can say pass the soya milk. Just you wait.