after the drive there, it's understandable

As a youth in a smallish village which wasn't in the middle of nowhere but the middle of Lincolnshire which was eighteen miles from the nearest city, six-and-a-quarter miles from the nearest town and four miles from the nearest bookshop I was happy when I turned seventeen as it would mean that I could make my way around the pretty flatness at thrice the speed available to a bicycle and with considerably more passengers or items of musical equipment than even the sturdiest bicycle might convey. I was able to drive to school on occasion so that lunch could be spent eating beef-paste sandwiches in a field up a hill; I could get to band practise on Sunday afternoons and get back home in time to go to swimming club; I could pop to Lincoln whenever I wanted to poke at the records and books in the secondhand shops rather than just when my parents needed to restock the freezer; I could go for nice long drives through the countryside after a sober evening in the pub or at a mate's house to contemplate things.

Although it wasn't as bad then as it is now Lincolnshire has always been a county of many RTAs and many driving fatalities. I believe it even held the UK record for a few years running though it got very slightly safer after "xx road deaths so far this year" signs were installed. Although a lot of it consists of relatively generously wide long, straight roads it also features lots and lots of un-chevroned twistybits (often with large, sturdy trees for people to ram into) and the occasional almost deliberate crash-bait such as a bend and an hump-back bridge at the end of six perfectly straight miles. I never drove really stupidly and never crashed but quickly found out that it doesn't take much to skip over the line from tolerably safe to really really dangerous, no matter how well you think you know the roads or the vehicle. About the only good thing about the county's drivers is that they will do relatively considerate things such as crash into the only tree on four miles of road rather than take out innocent oncoming traffic.

I'd mostly started driving sensibly and safely by the time I came up here though hardly drove at all as a student except for a couple of memorable occasions with a flatmate's knackered old car which wouldn't start from warm which once meant an amusing two-hour wait on Charlotte Square waiting for it to cool. I accidentally snapped the handbrake cable on his next car though so fair's fair. When I visited home it was tempting to remember the roads through the wheel but I reasoned that I would spend more time enjoying the scenery if I was going more slowly. A lucky decision as my parents scrapped that memory-rich car shortly afterwards.

Several years of cycling in a city had made me extra-aware of just how dangerous it is on the roads, especially with the added threats of buses, taxis and pedestrians which Lincolnshire's extra-urban roads don't see much of though they have a few extra buses now. I was being driven about a bit too in the open-back van-things Nicky borrowed from her work but not driving myself. After a couple of years she stole her parents' old shitebag which provided a few more fun almost-breakdown occasions before we finally bought a car four and an half years ago.

Now...

The car I learnt in was an old-style Micra but I drove a Nissan Prairie for the first few years during uni holidays. It's wasn't massive but it was wide-ish and long-ish but this was mitigated by a nice upright driving position and the fact that you could see every corner and the fact that I was mostly driving it around empty lanes. When we went to the Netherlands in 2000 we hired an Easycar A-class which was smaller but which I was too scared to drive as it was just too rounded and horrible and can't -tell-where-the-corners-are. The Twingo in France the next year was better and smaller but still had me clutching the steering wheel very tightly. We bought a Seicento in 2003 which is almost as small as can be but in which I have become increasingly petrified as a driver and (especially?) as a passenger (including (despite the narrowness of the car) flinching whenever going through a gap of less than three metres as I'm certain it'll scrape). I don't know if it's just because if I drive I have to spend at least ten minutes in city before escaping or that I've been cycling much more over the last five years and have seen the wrong end of motor vehicles a couple of times or have maybe just lost that feeling of youthful indestructability... in any case, I now can't understand how anyone driving in a city can find the time to enjoy, relish, look forward to, long for or miss it. Even in the relative quietness of the early autumn evening when it's too cold for there to be many pedestrians and cyclists to watch out for and the rush hour has trickled away there are still far far far too many things to have to concentrate on just to be safe, never mind happy. If I'm being driven during a busy period it's got to the point where my clutching of handles and bracing of feet starts to distract Nicky from the process of driving.

But some people go out for a drive to relax...