The Learner -- I'm learning to drive in this gap before the US. Here's what it's like.

I’m motoring along with a strangely empty London road ahead.

“We use our mirrors to check that we are in keeping with the general traffic flow,’ says Hal, the driving instructor.

Jammed up in my mirror are the large and restless shapes of vans and buses. An exodus of traffic is stuck behind my crawling red Ford, which is emblazoned in learning logos and topped off with a cone. Someone honks.

I don’t really see why I should learn to drive, so I feel virtuous that I am doing it anyway. Each time I climb into the special car I advertise my deficiencies to the world and display a certain eagerness to remedy them. I think this is noble.

But people don’t nod at me as I jerk past or roll down the window and say, ‘Nice one, mate, adult learning, good on you.’ All I get by way of support is a very patronizing grin from some mum in her family monster-wagon and even her stare is more voyeuristic than kindly.

Even though everyone (nearly) has learned to drive at some point and gone through the same awkward fumblings and embarrassments, everyone seems to want to distance themselves as quickly as possible from the experience and demonstrate their membership among the proficient and capable. Learners are unfairly cast as joke characters, like virgins.

And like virgins, learners make up a fractious community, each one desperately trying to leave. At the beginning of each lesson Hal takes me to ‘the patch’, a quiet network of streets where other learners play and practice reversing. Big shiny dual control cars covered in stickers inch around corners while their nervous drivers try and ignore each other.

Hal warms me up here and then we hit the main roads. It’s just one big emergency. Workmen start drilling just when I’m close, buses appear improbably in tiny streets, roads narrow suddenly and without justification and traffic lights are always on hills. In the end, I crack, stalling and swearing on a hairpin left turn when a Volkswagen comes round the corner like a banshee. ‘Back to the patch,’ says Hal. And we start again.

I like Hal. He’s better than my last instructor, a man called Reg who used to crack mints in his hands and whistle. Hal is from Blackheath and fills the car with talk, ‘I’m in commentary mode now,’ he says, as he bangs on about the bus in front. Hal’s been teaching driving for 16 years and says he doesn’t look it. He doesn’t like tv but he likes biography. He tells me about Eric Cantona’s ghost written autobiography.

‘It’s not Cantona writing, but some other bloke. But what the other bloke has done, he has got things that Cantona actually said and put them in the book. Now THAT,’ and Hal says this with all the certitude of a driving teacher celebrating a smart three point turn, ‘is a good way to write biography!’

The lesson finishes and later I’m walking down the street wondering why only driving learners have to suffer such stigma for their frailties. Why don’t people who are too slow at bank machines wear stickers on their faces? Or people who never buy interesting presents or don’t know their way on the underground?

I am happily imagining a regime of l-plate shame when a learner comes wobbling around the corner and clips the roundabout. I try not to laugh at him but I do.