Do you need to know how to drive to be a man?
When I turned 18 years old, I received a razor in the post. It was a marketing campaign by Gillette to congratulate me on "becoming a man", even though I'd been shaving for years by the time I opened it. I also seem to remember receiving a birthday card from the local Tory MP, given there was a general election coming up soon. (I didn't vote for him.)
The present I was actually excited about was a new electric guitar: my second, slightly more grown-up instrument (which I still play today). This was the gift I requested when my parents asked if I wanted driving lessons.
I grew up in a small village miles from anywhere. If you wanted to head into the "big city" (Nottingham, 15th most populous city in the UK) it was nearly an hour on an expensive, infrequent bus. All my friends lived a few miles away on the other side of a steep valley. In many ways, then, it was a bad decision of mine not to opt for driving lessons.
I'm a teenager, get me out of here
I knew I didn't want to stay in the village, though. I had a vague teenage dream of leaving the semi-rural provinces and going to live in an actual big city, where cars wouldn't be needed and I'd live some kind of urban lifestyle (the fifteen minute city, as realised in 2003?).
All my friends did learn to drive, though, so eventually I became left behind (figuratively and literally) and dependent on them for lifts.
At the age of 32, I finally learned to drive. My partner was pregnant and I was worried about not being able to take her to the hospital. The prospect of her having to give birth in the back of an Uber (or a bus) wasn't one I really fancied, so I spent a stupid amount of money on an ridiculous number of lessons.
There's a correlation between age and driving lesson time – the older you are, the longer it takes. Received wisdom tells us this is because you become more risk-averse as you get older, and that experience teaches you to approach every trip on the road like it may be your last. Learning to drive in Birmingham only increased this sense of imminent death for me, and I've been a road cyclist for long enough to already know that most drivers will happily put your life at risk if it saves them 20 seconds.
I managed to end up with a driving instructor who strung me along for months, repeating "you're not ready for your test yet" until I dumped him after 100 hours of lessons and booked the test with someone else. (I passed on my second attempt, but in no way does this take away from the veracity of my point above)
The open road
I hate driving, these days. Every time I get in the car I feel guilty for contributing to the well-documented car culture in Birmingham (not to mention the environmental impact), and there's always someone else on the roads—a man—making the experience stressful and dangerous for other people. In many ways, I wish cars had never been invented.
I grudgingly keep my car because when things like family holidays come up (with two kids and all their assorted packaging), it's a godsend. Ditto visits to rural destinations where years of bitter experience taught me that public transport doesn't reach. I take no joy in the vehicle itself: I'm still astounded at the popularity of things like Top Gear because surely no normal person really gives that much of a toss about transmissions, boot capacity and all the rest of it?
At worst, car chat becomes a coded masculinity test and I instinctively avoid that stuff: I feel no desire to pretend to care how the car works, in the same way I don't feel the need the familiarise myself with the inner structure of my washing machine.
As a teenager, I dreamed of being independent and urbane, not needing to drive between anonymous, dull villages because I'd be living a life of tech cool (something like Neo from Matrix). These days I just don't want to spend precious brain cycles thinking about things as mundane as forward motion, or impressing shallow men because I know how many litres my engine is.
Mini feels this week
Man cave complete
My garden shed conversion project—eg. turning it into a home office—is basically done. The builders still need to swap out a window, but on Monday this week I moved all my stuff in. I'm pathetically excited about having my own space away from the house (even if it's only a few metres), and although it's a cliché, I'm loving having a space of my own. Here's how it looks currently:
I'll sign off here – thanks for reading! Tell me what you think about cars, too.
—Matt