Daughter Number One is learning to drive.
This is quite something given that she still hasn't learnt to pick her clothes off the floor.
But credit to her she's keeping at it. She's managed four lessons so far. That's more than I managed at her age. I gave up after three. Partly because I didn't get on with the instructor. Mostly because my dad had utterly undermined my confidence.
Not deliberately. He just suggested I try and drive the works van along a dirt road from the dump the day before my first lesson. For practice. I took 10 seconds to crash the works van through a wire fence. [1]
It would be another 10 years before I tried to learn again. And my dad never offered to give me a lesson again.
Daughter Number One hasn't suggested I take her out yet. Maybe she doesn't want to hear me shouting at her. She gets enough of that on a daily basis at home.
Parenthood seems to me a constant reminder that I'd make a rubbish teacher. I'd be the one who can't control his class, resorts to petty and stupid threats that I can never carry out [2] and then gets exam results that suggest that no one has been listening all term anyway. Plus, I'd get a really insulting nickname.
My daughters probably have one of those for me anyway. I'm happy to live in ignorance.
So it's possibly a sensible precaution that we keep parenting and driving lessons separate for the foreseeable future. We don't need a full-blown barney on the back road to Polmont.
In the end I learnt to drive around Stirling. So if you were motoring around Raploch at the start of the nineties I can only apologise. I was the one driving that hiccupping car in front of you. Oh, the gears I stripped.
I only started taking lessons because J was and she guilted me into joining in. She passed her test before I did. And then never drove again. (Apart from that time she pulled out in front of a police car in Denny. On reflection that experience might have had something to do with it.)
Still there may be upsides to this latest development. In my idle moments I imagine a future in which Daughter Number One passes her test and I am freed from the yoke of designated driver. And then I remember picking her up on Saturday nights will probably continue for a while yet. Hopefully she knows that drinking a pitcher of strawberry daiquiri is not, after all, conducive to safe driving.
"How's it going?" I ask her after her latest lesson.
"Good. I keep stalling at junctions though."
She gives me a look. She knows I still do that more than 20 years after I passed my test.
FOOTNOTES
[1] No one can claim damages 35 years on, can they?
[2] "Right, we're not leaving until I find out who drew that image of male genitalia on the blackboard. Except I've got the dentist this afternoon. But tomorrow ..."
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