I can’t decide if I’m a brilliant or bad driver. I admit I didn’t pass first time (it only took seven attempts). But in the intervening decades, I’ve amassed so many miles behind the wheel I like to think that, if he knew me, I’d be Sadiq Khan’s Public Enemy No.1.
High mileage, no major accidents and zero fatalities must mean I’m alright. I’ve got a clean licence too. I put it down to the rosary I chant along to on Spotify with all the superstitious spirituality of a Sicilian nun as I speed across town for my dawn swim. It has been divinely ordained that I should dovetail the numerous speed awareness and driver awareness courses I accumulate every three years.
I decided not to quibble but to burst into tears instead
My first experience at the mercy of the traffic police is still raw. It was a typical Tuesday in the middle of the holidays: me, running late, illegally cramming my own daughters and three cousins into our frankly condemnable car, and driving them at high speed to five different courses in different parts of town, beginning at the same time, while applying my make-up in the rear-view mirror and using my phone to field requests for George Ezra. (To this day, I thrive on just this sort of finely calibrated mission, which requires not so much a following wind as a private jet or at least my very own outriders.)
As anyone who’s ever driven in London knows, it’s impossible to execute such a plan playing by the rules. One is forced to behave in a less-than-scrupulous way. I’m a much nicer person outside of the London rush hour – indeed, I commit one act of driverly generosity a day. Stopping to allow a pensioner to cross, not tooting a learner, refraining from undertaking a Nissan Micra on a side street – that sort of thing. (I usually do it early, mid-rosary, before my swim. Afterwards, I’m out of sorts if at least two other drivers haven’t told me to eff off while dashing home for the school run.)
I was driving pretty aggressively, but all things considered, doing well. Two children had been deposited, and I had just three left to dispose of. The sun shone; we’d mercifully moved on to Taylor Swift; one of my eyes was perfectly made-up. The sunlight dappled through the sunroof and glinted on the mirror as I jumped a temporary traffic light without even thinking. Then I became aware of something else glinting – something unnatural and blue.
I meekly pulled in. I have a robust contempt for the fuzz but my instinctive insubordination crumbled as the plain clothes officer sidled up. Smiling as best one can when conscious one is only half-made up, I decided to wing it. ‘I’m terribly sorry officer but I must have accidentally jumped that temporary light’. ‘Madam, I’ve been tailing you since Hammersmith. In that time, you’ve used your phone, applied mascara at the wheel, undertaken on Putney High Street and hit over 60 mph on Putney Heath’. I decided not to quibble but to burst into tears instead. As the mascara streaked down my face, he softened, ‘I’ll just put you down for jumping a temporary red. Now, if I could see your licence?’
Of course, I didn’t have it with me. I’ve since learnt that adults genuinely carry these things around. It was duly procured, admittedly in the wrong name and address (my younger daughter still refers to my delivering it to the local police station as ‘your night in the cells’. It wasn’t – it took half an hour in broad daylight – but such primal revisionism will give her future therapist fodder).
Some months later, nursing a two-day hangover from the Quorn Hunt Ball, I found myself in an Alan Partridge-style Travel Tavern on the Hangar Lane gyratory, where two grey men in dreadful suits went through the good cop–bad cop routine. My fellow miscreants were mesmerising; some genuinely thought the national speed limit was 40mph. As part of this assault on one’s intelligence, we discussed how the weather effects driving conditions. ‘Has anyone here ever experienced black ice?’ There was a horrified collective intake of breath. But such is the amount of driving I’ve done, I could shed some light on this as I’d hit a patch driving through Dorset one crystalline January morning. ‘Do you want to describe how that felt?’ queried bad cop. Recalling the total lack of control, I didn’t hesitate: ‘Liberating’.
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