Member-only story
A love letter to:
My driving instructor
It’s probably fluke rather than any personalised design. No matter, your teaching stuck with me and 25 years later I have cause to send my gratitude once more.
My morning walk takes me up and down a couple of hills around where I live. I follow the same route most days, it’s only twenty minutes — enough to feel like I’ve done something but not so long it feels like a burden at the start of a busy day.
If I follow the clockwise way the final descent takes around four minutes with a view of the main road, the one that connects the closest town with the city, so there’s plenty of traffic at almost any time of day. I walk first thing most days so I get to witness rush hour and thank myself for choosing work that doesn’t require me to join the throngs of commuters.
As the bottom of this residential street now so familiar to me is a chain coffee shop, a nursery, the library and the GP surgery, and limited parking.
Today I watched a red hatchback try to get into the single space in a row of four cars along the side of the road.
It’s just maths really; angles, speed, markers — I remember you teaching me roughly where on an adjacent car I should turn the wheel left, straighten up, then hard right (but careful not to clip the bumper!).
