My first driving lesson

As this post will no doubt indicate, I emerged from my first outing behind the wheel of a car unscathed. I think I did rather well, stalling only twice, and generally making the thing go in a straight line without hitting anything. Or anyone. I arrived home feeling heartened.

The lesson took place in a little nook of South Woodford, so positioned as to run parallel to a busy A-road, the net effort of which was to simulate the noise and commotion of driving quickly with lots of other people buzzing in your ears without any of the pesky traffic and other business. Whether this was intentional or not I don't know, but it certainly made me a bit nervous to begin with. Happily this was short-lived.

As if my 'novice' status wasn't obvious enough, the fact the place in which I was having my lesson was also the site for a dozen or more other lessons, (each under the livery of a different driving school, each performing their own little 3-point turns or, more rudimentarily, their cockpit drill and learning how to start up and move off properly) was a source of amusement and surprise. It was like a little learner's commune, L-plates our badges of honour and our fleeting glances of concentration and tentative gestures of acknowledgement a sort of improvised code of brotherhood. "I'm learning to drive", we seemed to say to one another, "and so are you". When behind the wheel it's both hard and unwise to try to form thoughts much more complicated than this, as you can imagine.

And so, some 6 years after wanting to start learning to drive, I have finally got my way and have put into motion to plan to clog up our capital's roads with yet another environment-bothering automobile. God Bless our modern freedoms.