James Delingpole James Delingpole

Girl is teaching me the art of walking on eggshells

‘Dad, am I driving like a normal driver yet? Are you relaxing like a normal relaxed passenger or are you still worrying all the time we’re going to crash?’ I love going for driving practice with Girl. It takes me right back to that precious late adolescence I’d almost forgotten: the period where the thing that matters to you more than anything in the world is the imminent prospect of freedom behind the steering wheel of your very own car.

Think of it! Any time you like you can just get into the driver’s seat, start the engine and go anywhere you want. Scotland. Cornwall. Across the Channel on a ferry. To mates’ parties, beaches, the pub, to uni… I quite understand why Girl is so keen. But I also now realise why, subconsciously, I fought quite hard to put her off.

‘It’s no skin off my nose giving you the odd lift to wherever you need to be,’ I’d say, casually. Or: ‘I’ve just had a look at the cost of insuring provisional drivers and it’s even worse than I thought!’ Or, desperately now: ‘You know, driving is so much hassle these days I wouldn’t bother till you’re older.’

But the thing about teenage females is that they know exactly what they want and exactly how to get it. We dads are putty in their hands — and always have been, right from that first moment, when they gazed up from their Moses basket and smiled and gurgled at us (in the way that boy children don’t do nearly so well, because they’re far less evil, manipulative and shameless).

So first I was organised and chivvied into forking out for driving lessons; then into buying a car which was meant to be shared between herself and her brother, but which she has commandeered; then into sorting out the insurance, so we could enjoy ‘quality father-and-daughter time’ dicing with death on the roads of Northamptonshire.

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