Driven Round the Bend - Deciding to learn to drive

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The only time I've ever felt the need to learn to drive was when I was 17 and in my sixth year at school. Everyone else in my year was learning to drive, and it was the done thing. However, as most of them passed fairly swiftly, I was always able to cadge a lift from friends, and after a while, the urge to join my motorised peers faded.

At University in Edinburgh there was simply no need to drive. Even though the public transport network was appalling, there was much fun to be had getting the night bus (or party bus) home with similarly sozzled pals, and to be frank, it was struggle enough to keep our bus passes up to date, let alone contemplate the extortionate expense of running a car on my paltry student grant. Leaflets from the BSM urging huge discounts for students learning to drive usually ended up as paper planes, or roach material.

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After leaving Edinburgh I moved to London, where driving held no appeal whatsoever. There simply wasn't the need to drive there. And from London I moved to Beijing, the ultimate city of bicycles: flat as a pancake and gridlock central. With average speeds for motorists of 7kph, it's quicker to walk than drive a car there.

So I've managed fairly well thus far, right up into my early thirties when disaster struck and I had to move back to the family home. My family live in the Borders, a beautiful picturesque rural paradise, with a horribly dysfunctional public transport network. Indeed, the only people who use the buses in the Borders are OAPs with their free bus passes, or anyone else with no pressing need to get anywhere remotely on time.

I managed a month of struggling along without a car, but the hours spent waiting on grass verges in the pouring rain and bitterly cold wind got too much to bear and I cracked. It's impossible to survive without a car in rural Scotland, and as I don't want to spend the rest of my life trapped indoors and isolated from society, I had to bite the bullet and learn to drive.

This blog is going to chronicle my learner driver efforts. I'm quite frankly petrified about the thought of being behind the wheel of a death machine, and the Theory Test scares the living daylights out of me. However, being isolated scares me more, so it's time to man up and learn to drive!

Zoom zoom!!