My daughter was 17 yesterday, her provisional driving license came through and as all official Driving lesson channels are closed for the time being, it was up to me to teach her the fundamentals of driving. As a chap who has been driving for 30 years now, who takes tri-annual speed awareness tests, purely for research purposes of course, and drives all over the wilds of The Shires, a large proportion of which is spent on grass verges and sloppy muddy puddles, it seems absolutely correct that I should take it upon myself to teach my daughter my own bad driving habits.

Mirror, signal, manoeuvre are three things I do when I brush my teeth in the morning, whilst waving goodbye to my son as he catches the school bus and I put my wellies on ready to take the dog out. So when faced with the teaching process I swallow a couple of valium and use the force, becoming gradually more relaxed as the drugs kick in. Sitting in a slip road of a pub in a tiny village in Worcestershire we drove forward, stalling a few times, reversing a few times less, turning and braking, violently braking. I had one hand on the handbrake as my eyesight started to blur and the sound of the engine conjured up crazy machines jostling for position, fighting against each other, vroom vroom… 

At one point she shouted help me Dad as she lifted her hands of the steering wheel and grabbed my arm, which fortunately hadn’t gone to sleep and I pulled the hand brake preventing us for plunging headlong into a mixed negative hedge. After an hour and a half of these shenanigans we appraised the situation, and we came up with the following. 

Aside from the braking, the clutch control, the changing of gears, the stalling and over acceleration and the steering, which was concerning; apart from all those things, she gets a gold star from me as she let me sleep in the back seat when we reached home once more, only waking up when my dribble started to freeze on my cheek and my watch read 2am.

Can’t wait till tomorrow.

Of course I wasn’t high on valium, I’m not a fucking idiot