Last Of The Can’t Drive Club

About 6 years ago I made a concerted effort to learn how to drive. I got to the point where, accompanied by an instructor, I could drive on a motorway. And then my youngest boy appeared and I decided to finally get round to completing my part time University degree… and the money wasn’t there to support £120+ a month for driving lessons. I “temporarily” gave them up.

It was probably a bad decision. Especially as I was so close to qualifying for my test. And let’s face it, I think deep down inside part of me knew that this cessation in acquiring this particular skill was anything but temporarily.

Driving never seemed natural. Not to me. I always felt I was breaking some secret rule, some hidden druidic law concealed at the very heart of my own personal universe. I was never meant to drive.

I never felt the burning desire like most of my peers did in my late teens. Never felt the lure of having my own set of wheels in my twenties. And just wasn’t career minded enough in my thirties to see how being able to transport myself beyond the walkable limits of Leamington Spa might aid me in my desperate search to find a more soul satisfying line of employment.

I gulled myself that I wasn’t the only one. I had numerous male friends who couldn’t drive, hadn’t learnt and exhibited utterly no desire to do so. One of those, Dave, has been my mate since I was 16. I always felt we were destined to walk the earth, to quote Samuel L. Jackson in Pulp Fiction, “like Cain”. With occasional reference made to a bicycle. I haven’t had regular contact with Dave for a few years now but I knew he and I were upholding the virtues of “Shanks’s Pony”.

I even kidded myself that all this was ecologically responsible. The last thing the world needs is another driver and another car on the road, right?

Not learning how to drive sat comfortably with me. It was me; it was who I was and I was content.

I learnt last week that Dave, sometime over the last few years, has not only learnt to drive but also owns a car. He’s made a couple of references to it on Facebook. I was so ingrained in how I thought of us two that I actually thought he was joking the first time. That it was a wind-up.

But no.

He really does own a people carrier and can drive the ruddy thing. Up and down the country and even across to Europe if he goes via the Eurotunnel.

I am the last member of the Can’t Drive Club. The schism that life has thrown up between Dave and I is worse than I ever imagined. He’s now a motorist and I’m just a pedestrian.

I haven’t felt this bad since all my school mates got picked to be prefects and I didn’t.

The world is leaving me behind.

Quite literally in fact.

With the wind behind me, going downhill on a good day, I might be able to reach 15 miles an hour… but that really is my top limit.

Small Unremembered Acts Of Violence

I am not given to random acts of violence. On the whole I’m fairly pacific. But I guess the stresses of modern living have lowered my threshold somewhat because I am finding myself more and more overtaken with a burning desire to twat people.

Very often people I don’t know. Perfect strangers. Though from their behaviour it is clear that there is very little that is perfect about them.

Take yesterday for example. My wife and I were in our car approaching a T-junction. As we slowed down a pedestrian stepped out in front of us to cross the road and we all of us did that peculiar British thing of hesitating in our resolve. The guy bobbed back and forth unsure if we were going to let him cross. My wife slowed but not completely as, in the vernacular of the road, the car behind us was right up our arse.

This little dance – this little tennis match of non-decision making and non-commitment – lasted mere seconds but, due to the quantum effects of the time-space continuum and much theorizing by Professor Brian Cox, seemed to last forever.

In the end, not wishing to be caught forever in a time loop and subsequently rescued by Matt Smith (though the lovely Karen Gillan would have been fine) I put an end to this mini eternity by waving the fellow in front of us across the road: go on, my son, you may pass, on your way, go about your business.

He did so. But then had the audacity to stand at the road side as we drew close to him and gave us the mother of all glares and the dubious benefits of his middle finger.

What?!

I erupted like an Icelandic volcano. I believe certain words crossed my lips that rhymed rather nicely with trucking banker.

My wife laughed it off and turned the corner both euphemistically and in reality.

I on the other hand have to admit that had it not for my boys being in the back of the car and my wish to set a good example to them weighing heavily on my mind would have leapt out of the car for a mere tuppence, run up to this shining paragon of social politeness and kicked him up the jacksy so hard my boot would have remained shiny for a 12 month.

It prayed on my mind for a good hour afterwards. I was seething at the mere thought of this arrogant little dickhead slumping his way to work, thinking he’d got away with this monumental act of rudeness and feeling somehow that he’d scored a small victory for the common man.

Victory my arse!

He had no right of way, goddammit! We let him pass before us out of kindness! He should have waited!

We should have run the effing little toe-rag over!

My teeth ache just at the memory.

Is it normal this amount of rage? Is it normal to fantasise about meeting this fellow in a dark alley and finding I have a baseball at my disposal to disrupt the relationship of his femur to his patella?

Shouldn’t I just live and let live?

Because in the end, I did just that, didn’t I?

So why don’t I feel very glad about it?