I Never Learned To Drive
And listen, here's why.
OK, here’s what I remember. I was sitting in the back and my friend was driving, turning a corner on the way back from Beachy Head where the exorcism had taken place. I was 20. It was a warm and windy day, imprinted now with the kind of nostalgia that has you mistily telling children how when we were young we used to memorise phone numbers and use paper maps. We were studying together at art college, an experimental degree course that combined critical theory with material art-making and some delicious pomposity that resulted in things like: having this three-wheeled car ordained and exorcised before allowing it, unfortunately, to change my life forever.
A week earlier a production company had arrived at college, inviting us to take part in a reality makeover show. Two teams, the first made up of the well-dressed design students, the second, us, were each given a secondhand Reliant Robin and £500 in order to transform the cars before putting them up for auction. The team that made the most money was the winner. Perhaps I’ve told you this story before – the way they found us at exactly the right point in our lives, when we were acutely aware of the power we yielded with our citric youth and when we still believed in art, silliness, the divine.
Perhaps I’ve told you that, while we art students decided to transform our car’s soul (and, through a series of occasionally occult processes, including turning it into a confessional booth, rid it of its very “car-ness’ forever) what the design students did to their car was simply: paint it. What I will not have told you, because it was only this week that I realised it, when an editor invited me to go speeding round a race track for some reason, is that this single experience has led to me not only never learning to drive, but also made me a bad passenger who remains stupidly scared of going fast. Which old me, art student me, the me who merrily helped spend our £500 renovation money on vodka cranberries and zoomed round Brighton in heels as if it was burning, would be mortified to hear.
‘There had been no broken bones in the crash, no blood, just a little light whiplash and some terrible crunching sounds’
Anyway, we were on the way back from Beachy Head. The exorcist had met us there to cleanse the Reliant Robin of any bad spirits following our awkward afternoon with a psychometric reader up the coast, where a polite sex worker had asked us to move our little car on because its presence was disturbing the orgiastic vibe. Brighton is notoriously hilly, its streets falling sharply as you approach the seafront, and it was on one such road, near our halls of residence, that we turned a sharp corner and found ourselves suddenly flying. There was a moment of something like elation, a sharp, ice-like clarity, before the top of our roof skidded along the side of a parked car, careened on a single wheel into another parked car, then crashed very loudly into the front of a pub.
