All this week we’ll be talking about those things that we just couldn’t be without for 40 days and 40 nights. Today, Sinéad’s a little mollycoddled…
I came late to driving. Not late to being behind the wheel of a car, just late to driving.
Jesus, I was woeful.
I started learning at the tender age of 17. My first great failing was my inability to successfully ease off the clutch and onto the accelerator in anything akin to a smooth movement. Sometimes we juddered forward, more often the engine cut out. Everyone starts out like that, of course – but not everyone keeps it up for weeks on end.
Eventually able to propel the vehicle at a speed at least faster than walking (an achievement, after many weeks of giving myself whiplash against the seatbelt with violent spluttering halt after violent spluttering halt), I undertook to master being on the road. My cousin, who had got her car exactly one month before me, was drafted in to teach me. Far from lording her talents over me, she gamely took to the passenger seat three or four times a week and chain smoked as I played unintentional chicken with any other road user who happened into our path. I’m not sure why either of our sets of parents allowed it. I deeply suspect that they figured I couldn’t kill myself at five miles per hour.
Fast forward seven years and my first battered runabout has been replaced five times over as I’ve ascended the heights of power steering and a 1.6 litre engine. I have gained an amount of spacial awareness and no longer play chicken, though parallel parking remains a trial. I drive everywhere. And I don’t understand people who don’t.
Realistically, my car is somewhat less economical than Greece. I fork out thousands in tax, insurance, petrol, maintenance and – that awful bastard – on-street parking.
And yet, ask me to do without it and I will laugh in your face.
It’s the radio, you see. Flying along as fast as the speed limit will allow and blasting out the playlist of the moment. Singing along without a thought cast as to who might be listening.
And the comfort. The personal space. Never will I have to put up with the smelly encroachment of other passengers. Never will my morning commute involve being pressed up against strangers or being given an incongruous papercut on the eyebrow by the swing movement of someone else’s MetroHerald skimming too close to my face.
Most of all it’s living to my own timetable. Five more minutes in bed? I WILL HAVE YOU. ALL WILL BE WELL. Need to get to town any time past midnight? No hassle. Want to stop for a coffee without wondering if it’ll mean dashing for a bus? Such is my life and it is glorious.
Oh sure, I have the under-exercised calf muscles of a girl who’s never set arse on a bike. Sure, I’m a slave to the endless search for a parking space within a three mile jog of wherever I might be going. Sure, I’ve developed a dependency not unlike the relationship between man and faithful puppy – make no mistake, I’m the puppy – and dissolve into a wreck whenever my faithful chariot has to spend a few days in the garage. But live without her? I couldn’t.
I know there was a life before driving and I can imagine my world without it – but it’s a bitter, cold world full of exposure to the elements and carrying heavy things for miles.
The public transport evangelists would surely argue that I am stomping my big, inconsiderate carbon footprint all over the world without pause for concern. To them I say, at least I could pause if I wanted to. If you pause, you’ll miss your bus, and it’ll probably splosh through a puddle and soak you from head to toe while you dash along the path toward your stop.
Bus takers, bikers, LUASheads, walkers, DARTers – they’re just like social smokers. They just don’t want to buy their own car but they’ll happily ensconce themselves in yours. Social drivers – I’ll go if you’re going. Oh, I only need one when I’m out.
Why would you drive, they say. Isn’t it an awful expense? Couldn’t you get a bus? No, of course I couldn’t. I live in a suburb. I work in a different suburb. Suburbs don’t link to each other via public transport. They only link to town. Haven’t you read How Dublin Works?
Once, the thought crossed my mind. Maybe I’d just forked out a year’s worth of tax all in one go for the pleasure of zig-zagging up and down the national highways and byways, avoiding potholes and navigating precarious, ill-made speed ramps in some sort of calamitous game. Maybe I’d spent twenty minutes second-gearing around town looking for a gap wide enough to squeeze the car into while desperately needing to pee. Either way, I considered it for the briefest of seconds.
Maybe I could give up driving.
It is, after all, my little vice. It makes my arse fatter. It makes my lie-in five minutes longer. It removes routine and allows me to live life to my own slipshod schedule. I’d be a better person without it. I’d dress appropriately for the weather, read the paper on the way to work, leave town on the last bus, save thousands in my new pedestrian life and holiday frequently while dining on foie gras.
But no… not even for 40 days.
Plan my days around the predetermined schedule of The Man? Proffer my ticket to be inspected? Endure squashed shoulders, the wet dog smell of rained-on travellers cooked up to full-bus temperature, halitosis, loud music that isn’t my own?
Never.
Public transport, you are my Lenten nightmare, and I wouldn’t do you if you were the last ride in town. Car, my beloved, I will never leave you.
