Automatic

In which I finally got my driving licence, sort of.

Photo by JESHOOTS.COM on Unsplash

Last week a wonderful thing happened.

I passed my driving test.

It finally happened. Something I have wanted since I was 17, and yearned for pretty much consistently in the twenty intervening years. I got into a car with an examiner, checked my mirrors, kept my shit together and drove more or less safely for more or less forty minutes.

Before last week, my driving history was, shall we say, chequered.

I failed my test twice in Dublin in my old manual teal blue 1997 Seat Ibiza (RIP ol’ gal, flights of angels). The first fail was fair - I had probably only been driving a month and a half and pulled out in front of a truck. The second fail, something about observation in my left mirrors. Whatever.

About ten years after that in the mountains of California, I managed to pass a test in an automatic - but a well-trained monkey could have passed that test. It consisted of driving once around a block of wide American streets and returning to a massive empty parkin…