Opinion

Anita Robinson: I don't mind driving - just don't expect me to parallel park

I was intrigued by a recent half-heard radio feature. Somewhere, (the name of which I missed,) has introduced pink parking bays for women drivers, a little wider than standard size, (the bays, not the women,) and located nearer the shop entrances.

Now ladies, before you get all feisty and feminist and feeling patronised, they have we’re assured, been provided from the most altruistic of motives, not in any way to be interpreted as mute criticism of your no doubt excellent parking skills.

Consider for a moment their many practical advantages. Less chance of getting wet, less distance to carry shopping; greater ease of getting in and out of your vehicle without damaged paintwork or dirtying your clothes; more room to wrestle with a baby and a buggy and no longer feeling unsafe in badly-lit multi-story car parks at night. What’s not to like?

I make no judgment of women drivers. I’m one myself – thirty years behind the wheel, absolutely competent so long as I’m alone in the car. Yet I drive by perfectly adequate parking spaces which are only accessible if you can reverse into them. I need the length of two Lough Swilly buses to park and even then it takes me about five goes and I can’t do it at all if anybody’s watching me. It’s something to do with my lack of spatial awareness and inability to gauge distance. Parallel parking and I have an old and bitter history.

I was a late and reluctant driver – only learning out of necessity because Daughter Dear was starting school and I was teaching in a different school on the other side of town.

One long and memorably miserable summer was given over to transforming me, the perpetual passenger, into a competent and safe road user. Several factors militated against this happy outcome. Firstly, our car – an elderly Volkswagen Beetle in a virulent shade of turquoise, that was heavy and ponderous as a small hippopotamus, with a steering wheel as big as a satellite dish. My driving instructor, a dear and lovely man of sanguine temperament and saintly forbearance remarked: “Ye might as well be drivin’ a pig.” Secondly, my poor co-ordination – anything involving hands and feet and looking where you’re going all at the same time, I have little aptitude for. Thirdly the singularly unsympathetic attitude of the Loving Spouse who could drive a lorry at fourteen, turn on a sixpence, park between two cars with an inch to spare front and back (and get it back out again) failed to understand why I couldn’t get the hang of it. Many a golden evening that summer was spent on rural roads practising, he progressively more tetchy and I, more tearful, the air thrumming with tension, sharp intakes of breath (his) and wails of despair (mine.) I’ll spare you the details, but Daughter Dear was very nearly the Child of a Broken Home.

My driving test was scheduled for a hardly auspicious Friday the 13th at 3:15 pm – just as every school in the city was getting out, the main streets were thronged with shoppers, parents with pushchairs and pensioners on walking frames attempting to cross the roads. It was also raining. The anonymous examiner’s face was set in neutral gear. Numb with nerves, I performed a series of graceful scallops; the three-point turn on a narrow residential street that nearly yanked my arms out of their sockets and various other tests of my incompetence, though my emergency stop was authentically perfect when a dog ran into the road.

Back at the test centre and the ‘viva voce’ on road signs and symbols, I was somewhat hampered by having learned them from a 10-year-old Highway Code, so the more modern ones were uneducated guesses. The examiner closed his folder. There was a long silence. The graven image beside me spoke. “I’m please to inform you Mrs Robinson that you have passed.” “Are you sure?” I asked. “Get out of the car before I change my mind,” he said, “ – and thank you for giving my daughter first prize in last Easter’s Schools Public Speaking Competition.”