It’s a well-known fact in my household that Daddy Dearest has his own very special neuroses when it comes to the family car and it’s probably best when he’s in the driver’s seat to just sit extremely still, look straight ahead and try not to breathe too loudly lest the sound distracts him unnecessarily from his very important task. And it’s also probably best to simply nod and make soothing noises when a random dickhead in a sports car does something stupid like cutting in half a metre in front of us and DD starts muttering about buying a Mack truck with headlights taller than every other car on the road and THEN we’ll see who’s game enough to try cutting in like that again, huh? HUH? (Yes, Daddy. There, there. You’re absolutely right.) And never are these quirks of his brought home more embarrassingly than when we’re giving a friend a lift home and he refuses to play any music except for Soviet-era Russian folk songs or that talkback radio station where all the presenters are mouth breathers. (PLEASE, Daddy, would it KILL you to put something remotely NORMAL on the air? Apparently literally so, according to you-guessed-who, hypothesising that pop music will make him go insane and ram the car into a tree.) But if you thought DD behind the wheel was bad, you never would’ve imagined that DD in the passenger seat could be worse…

In contrast to DD’s well-established driving habits, Mother Dearest has had her licence for years now (alas, she can only drive an automatic – oh, the STIGMA of not being able to handle a manual…) but it’s been ages since she’s done any actual driving because she’s lazy and takes public transport to work anyway. So DD has decided it shall be his mission to get her back into tip-top driving shape so MD can be the one ferrying me to all my extracurriculars for a change. Consequently, MD has become the official driving person on our semi-weekly trip to the city library to borrow weirdo foreign language DVDs and old issues of British Vogue – with DD giving instructions from the seat beside her, of course. I had the misfortune of bad judgement to decide to accompany them on one such journey not far into MD’s revived driving career. And oooh boy was it not pretty. Not pretty by a very VERY long shot.

Lesson One: Backing Out of the Garage. This was, without doubt, one of the most excruciating experiences I have endured inside a (barely) moving vehicle, and made for an extremely inauspicious start to our expedition. MD, who can barely see over the top of the steering wheel (hopeless spatial abilities and a four-wheel-drive doesn’t help, either), took a full twenty minutes of faltering bunny hops to manoeuvre the car into the general direction of the street. It was the embodiment of the one step forward, two steps back routine, narrowly missing the bike rack here, stopping ten centimetres short of a full-on collision with the opposite wall of the garage there. Whoops, don’t forget the ping-pong table. Whoops, there goes THAT headlight. OH MY GOD NOT THE NEIGHBOUR’S BACK FENCE.

Lesson Two: Turning the Corner at Five-Way Intersections. DD’s (immensely helpful) instructions to Mother Dearest go something like this:
“Okay… now! Go go go go! Turn the wheel! YES, the steering wheel! Keep turning, keep turning NO NO NO! You’re turning too much! Ease it off now, ease it off, ease it off! Not so fast, not so fast… MY GOD, WOMAN, SLOW DOWN!”

Now if that’s not enough to induce a nervous breakdown, I don’t know what is.

Lesson Three: How to Deal When the Siren Goes Off. So we’re moving on the highway in a tense and jumpy silence when suddenly from somewhere on the road behind us comes the unmistakable wail of a fire-engine siren. DD starts mumbling under his breath and MD, trying to keep track of all four directions at once, grows increasingly panicky, which she attempts to make up for by taking her foot off the pedal so we end up crawling down the road at about 5k an hour. Meanwhile, the siren’s getting closer and closer and every other car around us has turned into the parking lane at the left to let the fire engine through, and pretty soon it’s just the three of us pottering along on the road and the fire truck pressed against our bumper with the driver leaning on the horn. DD’s yelling incoherently, and MD’s utterly confused. And I’m sitting as low in my seat as possible, pretending I don’t know the driver nor how the hell I ended up in the car, until eventually Mother Dearest regains control of her senses and moves aside so that the good firemen can go past. You would not believe the range of dirty looks we got from the other drivers as soon as normal traffic resumed – a kill-me-now moment truly like no other.

Lesson Four: Parallel Parking. Nothing strikes fear in the hearts of novice motorists, or raises the blood pressure of the owners of the cars they’re driving, more than early attempts at parallel parking. DD sets it out in black and white – get the car at the right angle, turn the tires forty-five degrees, reverse, forward, reverse again and you’re there. Simple geometry, right? Not on your life. Once we’d secured a parking space (a harder task than you would think, as MD drives like she’s walking so by the time we reach what was an empty space it’s already been taken by someone moving at a normal speed), it takes a long and painful process to get the car in without causing anyone grievous bodily harm.

MD backs up half a metre. “Way too close, you’ll never get it in like that,” says her helpful passenger. She tries again, at a slightly larger angle. “I said, wider.” “I am going wider!” “Not wide enough!” MD takes it at an even larger angle. “Now that’s too wide.” Another three attempts until she’s found the exact angle to meet DD’s finicky criteria. Just as she’s concentrating on the back wheel outside the driver’s side window, a sudden outburst from you-guessed-who: “The passenger mirror! For god’s sake, pay attention to the passenger mirror!” “I can’t see that far.” They stare at each other. After the lapse of several seconds, MD shrugs and continues to back into the parking space with her head out the window.

Eventually MD does manage to park the car, and no one breathes a louder sigh of relief than yours truly. But as soon as MD unbuckles her seatbelt, DD finds something else to complain about – this time, the fact that MD has to adjust the driver’s seat back to get out of the car because she needs to push it all the way forward just to reach the pedal when she drives. One day you won’t push the seat forward properly and it’ll spring back when you’re driving, he argues, and you won’t be able to reach the brakes. It’s too hard to get out of the car when the seat’s pushed all the way to the front, she counters. So deal, he says, you’re not frail and elderly, you’ll be fine. But it’s too difficult, she says, and I don’t want to!

I lose patience and leave the two of them in there, still bickering over the ridiculously petty question of whether MD should push her seat back to get out of the car, and go into the library alone. They emerge, fifteen minutes later, ominously quiet and well behaved. I have never figured out who won the argument. Somehow, I just don’t think it makes that much of a difference in the scheme of things.

Remind me NEVER to take driving lessons from my father.

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