Unctuous Commentators on Fitful Conveyance,

Part of my day has been spent digging up the lawn in the front garden to expand the driveway. After having an old galoot of a 4x4 jeep for a few years, father has belatedly and sensibly bought a respectable new car. When the kids swarm the street and move near it, he becomes jumpy, thus the driveway is being extended to fit his car as well as mine. My car resides in the driveway as I try to drive as little as possible, and as it’s usually at home, I don’t want to risk leaving it in the street. People become really protective and incomprehensibly proud of their vehicles. I hate driving yet I worry constantly about the health of my car.

I’ve had 4 cars despite having decided that I would never drive. Thankfully, my position was changed after much persuasion from my parents but only several weeks after they dumped my first car upon me on my 17th birthday; they were right, of course, it’d have been mightily difficult to succeed without one. I never drove my first car, a blue 1982 Volkswagen Polo Mk II, on the road; it mainly served as a gang hut - occasionally driven back and forward along the driveway – before someone unexpectedly made a good offer to buy it. The car wasn’t on sale, but I wasn’t close to passing my driving test and father suspected that the car might need some repairs on the breaks in the future, so the car was sold.

Learning to drive was one of my most traumatic experiences. I hired my first driving instructor, Andy Herd, on the recommendation of a friend, one of his pupils at the time, and initially I was progressing well but it soon became apparent that the Andy was only trying to drain money from me – I was taking lessons but father noticed, during the lessons he was giving me in my second car, that my progress was levelling off. After around 20 lessons, the number the AA say an average learner will need to pass the test, I was seemingly far from being ready to take the test and Andy demoted me from driving around Kirkcaldy, the larger town where I would be taking the test, to Leven, the local town that I lurched around when I first started taking lessons. After refreshment with the basics around Leven, we returned to Kirkcaldy for what was to become my final lesson with Andy. I was becoming increasingly edgy and I made a few mistakes, Andy started raging hysterically, whilst flailing his arms, seemingly mimicking a forgotten ancient martial art, screeching at me, “You’re doing that with the clutch.” During this rant I really wanted to walk the 8 mile distance home, but I held my nerve, and politely dismissed him once we arrived back in Methil. I asked of my friend how he was faring with Andy’s lessons, and he told me his progress was deteriorating similarly under Andy’s tuition, “He made me kill a pigeon; there was a pigeon on the road so I slowed, Andy shouted ‘What are you doing? Do you want to kill a pigeon or cause a road accident? Accelerate!’”

My second car was a 1988 Citroen AX 1.1L. Father used to sit with me in it as I practised driving whilst learning. It was an ugly thing; navy blue with its bonnet hideously mottled by oxidation; inside it had a multitude of compartments that could hold trinkets of all sizes. I was finally able to drive it by myself after hiring Alex Cunningham or GUM as my driving instructor. After my first lesson, he said that I was a fine driver and told me to apply for a test date immediately, because he’d make me ready for whenever that date was. He wasn’t just a driving instructor, he was a psychologist and he had the most bizarre catchphrases which I never fully understood, “you’re not cut out for this speed, Matilda”, “What does two in the bed give you? A sore head.” Every time we visited a specific estate in Kirkcaldy, the following exchange was mandatory.

“What do they call this place?”
“I don’t know.”
“Spam Valley.”
“What?”
“What do they eat for breakfast?”
“I don’t know.”
“Spam. What do they eat for lunch?”
“Ehhh, spam?”
“What do they eat for tea?”
“Spam.”
“What do they have for supper?”
“Spam.”
“Correct. Take a left at the next junction.”

I passed a driving test on my second attempt and drove my Citroen AX for a year. It developed electrical problems which repeatedly drained the battery, it broke down in the railway station car park when the gear shift snapped but I finally lost patience with it when the key snapped and jammed in the lock, once I got into the car from the passenger door, the spare key snapped and became irremovable from the ignition. I gave up on my Citroen and it was towed from where the key fiasco occurred, the railway station car park, straight to the scrap yard.

My third car was a white 1991 Renault Clio 1.2L. This was, originally, a really neat car. The engine was able to sustain 5th gear at 25mph, so driving was easy. I drove it for 2 years, suffering only two snapped clutch cables; I wonder if my driving style was perhaps to blame. The second clutch cable snapped when my car was in the middle of a busy crossroads on the main road in Dunfermline during the morning rush hour and the only place I could push it to was a restricted parking area, so I did and I phoned the police to tell them what had happened. I apologised for leaving the ailing vehicle there whilst I continued to work by bus; I told them I had arranged for uplift later and had the permission of the shopkeepers’ whose premises my car was in front of and that I had left a note, with a phone number, in the window to alert any wardens to the situation but they unreasonably said that if a warden was to award me a ticket, I would still be liable for the fine. I escaped punishment but I resolved to buy a reliable car seeing as I had a lucrative, multi-million pound student placement contract at the chemical plant and would be travelling many miles each day to Grangemouth.

I bought a Peugeot 206 1.4LX and I can, at long last, bask in the luxury of a car with a CD player, air-conditioning and other fancy bits. I’m grateful that my car hasn’t suffered any technical problems yet. The only trouble it suffered was a woman, coincidentally or not, the nippy nurse that I had to endure at the orthodontists, ramming her car into the back of it. My car was mashed slightly, it was superficial but the mechanics have to carry out stringent integrity checks on the chassis of cars in these cases, and courtesy of her insurance, I was supplied with a silver 2004 Astra 1.8 CDi for around a month. I looked like a respectable company executive as I drove into the works car park everyday, at least until I got out and people gasped in confusion at the horrible mismatch – the scruffy student and the high-class car – but I hated that car during those weeks, obviously because I longed for the return of my own car, and I endlessly claimed unwarranted faults in it. I’d really like to have a car just like it again, it really was spacious and comfortable and not “designed for fat blokes”; I could dig up another patch of the lawn to accommodate it amongst my fleet.