Eponymous Anonymous

I've held fire for just so long! But here is a little story from my clumsy life. At the sprightly age of thirty-four I have begun to take learning to drive more seriously. I still haven't taken a formal lesson but my old friends Damian and 'anonymous' each gave me a lesson last week, on Monday and Tuesday respectively. Anonymous likes to think of himself as the tutor of everything par excellence, and was for a time last year driving instructor sine qua non. (I'm not sure what that latin means, but it is good to throw some around when you want to sound educated and aerodite.) Anyway, Damian usurped his position on the Monday and so in a fit of jealousy anonymouse said he'd let me drive his car on the Tuesday night.

So there I was indicating right when I wanted to turn right, flashing the lights from dim to full on to dim at leisure around the deserted car park. As anonymous was out of the car inhaling a well-needed nerve calmer, I thought I'd impress him with what I'd learnt from my other teacher the day before. So off I went slowly in reverse. As he puffed away I imagine he was suitably impressed, but I'm not one hundred percent sure as I had my eyes fixed firmly on my feet at the time. But as I braked I got that loving feeling that told me the car was going to stall. This was not quite the denouement to my stunt that I had envisaged. I was aiming at something with more aplomb, anything after which I could say 'ta da!' But ta da was not to be. As I didn't want to cunk out, I put my foot back on the accelerater, but then to resist getting too far away once more the brake was once more applied, repeating the manoeuvre after the fashion of the best recipes. This manoeuvre was however repeated at great length, you could almost say it was developing into a habit, with no way of breaking off from it presenting itself to the imagination.

At this stage, anonymous friend A decided that either the well-being of his friend or the value of his car was worth running for. He began to chase after it at a speed not usual for his frame. Einstein would have said that to the earth he was running fast, but relative to his car he was not moving at all. The more he ran the more the car trundled on. The driver, quick thinking as ever, reached over to the passenger side and swung the door open in the hope that this would encourage the runner, whom we may not name, to quicken sufficiently to save the day heroically, like a Starsky or Hutch or a Duke of Hazzard. This nighttime scene was complicately by the fact that the reversing car was by now passing two young observing girls, who just at this moment had accidentally set off the car alarm of their father's car, at which fact he was exercsing himself. The scene which they were then to witness served to lessen their burdens, I like to think, causing them as it did to look on compassionately at a situation much more problematic than their own. Where God locks a door, and sets off an alarm, he invariably opens a window.

Anyway, eventually the exhausted anonymee eventually rallied his blamangical obesity into the passenger seat and imparted the knowledge that the clutch was needed first; and well, that solved that. When I stopped laughing, I comforted my passenger with the thought that soon I could be helping him drive around Ireland.