O n Valentine's weekend here are three little words I never thought I'd say: I can drive. I am 44 and I can finally switch on the engine of a car (there's this key you turn), put the car in first, second, third, fourth and (ooer, missus) fifth gear. I can look in the side mirror and deduce that I will be able to change lanes without anyone crashing into me. I can do a three-point turn which is more like a 754-point turn.
But never mind, the thing is I now know the meaning of a three-point turn. I can drive to the airport. Or out to my friend’s house in Howth. Oh, the places I can go now that I have a handle on that clutch/accelerator/bite thingy.
So, I can drive. But I fear I have been taking taxis for too long to adjust to that notion. I can drive, that is true, but I wonder if I actually will.
Everyone else is convinced I’ll be driving all over the shop. “You won’t know yourself” – it is the thing that every single person says when you tell them that in middle-age, you are finally doing what one friend of yours has been doing since she was 11 (she grew up on a farm.)
I won’t know myself, apparently. I will be driving everywhere. But I am not so sure. The truth is I am only driving now because, as I mentioned last November, Audi got in touch and said it wanted to get me on the road – and not just me, other “more mature” women who still haven’t taken the plunge. So they paid for 12 lessons and found me an instructor. And whatever happens with my driving one thing I know for sure is the only reason I have learnt how to drive is because of this instructor. Her name is Olivia and I’m kind of in love with her.
Let me count the ways:
1. Olivia is a good bit older than me and yet still wears perfectly applied, thick black liquid eyeliner and has a kind of old-school movie star glamour that cannot be acquired. You either have it or you don't. I know it sounds strange, but it's extremely reassuring when the shadow of a huge truck falls across the bonnet and I think the end is nigh. The end is not even nearly nigh, Olivia's perfectly made-up eyes seem to say.
2. She is kind. Once she was sitting outside my house for half an hour while I was inside happily eating scrambled eggs and thinking the lesson was half an hour later than it actually was. When I breezily emerged, she just got on with the lesson without for one minute making me feel worse than I already did. This is what you call class.
3. She is genuinely happy for when you do something for the first time. Like when I did what us drivers call a "hill start" properly ("go on you good thing!!!") or the first time, I think it was lesson 12, when I was able to talk and drive at the same ("look at you talking AND driving. At the SAME time!!!!") or that other time when I went around the Artane roundabout without killing either of us ("Now you're sucking diesel!!!!").
4. She doesn't just teach people how to drive. For example, when she teaches young men about indicating and signalling, she also takes the opportunity to give other advice. As in, when they drive out to the airport she does a little light role play.
“So,” she says “you’ve driven your Mum to the airport. You’ve parked the car. Now what do you do?” And when the young men look at her like she’s cracked, or if they say ‘I’ll leave her there and drive off’, she puts them right. “What you do,” she tells them, “is you get out of the car, you take your Mum’s bag from the boot, you say ‘Ma. I hope you have a lovely holiday, safe travels’.”
I'd say everyone she has ever said that to never just leaves their mother on the side of the road at the airport. You see, whether she is dishing out etiquette tips to young ones or telling you to "ease up there on the revs", she is just very convincing.
This whole exercise has proven to this driver refusenik that, contrary to what I previously believed, I am not the only person in the world who is incapable of learning how to drive. But I don’t know if I could have done it without Olivia.
“You won’t know yourself,” she says because everyone says that. She also thinks I will love the fact that I can “pop to the Omni” to do my shopping. I know deep in my taxi-loving bones, I will never be popping to the Omni, but she makes me feel like I could do that and then enter a Grand Prix before breakfast.
Olivia.