Driving Miss Crazy

Happy to be alive after a car journey with Herself, Sophie White accepts her mum will probably kill her with vehicular homicide after reading this

Ihad an exhausting week of spending large amounts of time in confined spaces with my mother. Never a good idea — but when said confined space is a vehicle that she is driving, the situation tips over from mild irritation to mortal danger.

Herself is a shocking driver, and I can say this because I am also a shocking driver. I’m saying this not from any position of superiority, but in a ‘it takes one to know one’ kind of way.

She often likes to cite the fact that she has never had an accident as evidence that she is not a bad driver, while I, on the other hand, have had many knocks and bumps in the car, thankfully none involving other humans. I feel my propensity to ram gates and bollards is not because I am a bad driver, but rather because I am a gutsy driver.

I might slip through an amber light, as we are all wont to do on occasion, but my mother, who is nervy and hesitant in all matters, will attempt to get through an orange light at a terrifyingly slow pace. We can all agree that if you’re attempting to nip through on the amber, you have to commit, and do so quickly.

Similarly, I have been in the car when she has slowed to a near-stop while on a roundabout. Literally as she was going around it. It was truly frightening.

“Roundabouts are different in different places,” she insisted in response to my screams, as I squeezed my eyes shut and said a mental goodbye to my loved ones. Also roundabouts operate in a fairly universal way. They go in the opposite direction in foreign countries, but we were not in a foreign country, we were in Cork.

This brings me to my theory of why Herself has never caused a major collision. Her driving is so overtly bad that other drivers spot her from the outset and respond accordingly, giving her a wide berth, so she can continue to veer from lane to lane, never quite settling in either.

I can easily imagine fellow drivers just scrapping their entire travel plans after a brush with her lane-straddling ways. Meanwhile she, oblivious to the chaos she’s causing, spends mile after mile talking in an unending stream of gossip and tangential tales about people I’ve never met, rarely glancing at the road ahead, and, at all times, maintaining a migraine-inducing contact with those bumps that line the hard shoulder.

After our most recent car journey, I discovered that exposure to peril can be great seasoning. These Thai-style fish cakes were delicious after dodging death.

“She often likes to cite the fact that she has never had an accident as evidence that she is not a bad driver”