Is any parental duty more nerve-racking than sitting next to your learner driver son in the car (trying to hide your terror)?

OVER the past few weeks, shoppers at our local Sainsbury’s in South London may have noticed a grey Ford Focus, parked with apparent selfishness astride two bays. They may be forgiven for concluding that the car’s owner is a practitioner of ‘Clarkson parking’ — an expression new to me, until I saw it defined in yesterday’s paper.

I must throw up my hands at once and admit that the car is mine. But to the charge of Clarkson parking, as I understand the term, I plead not guilty.

For if I’ve got this right, a true Clarkson parker — named after Jeremy, pugnacious former presenter of Top Gear — is someone who deliberately leaves his car straddling two bays, so as to discourage other motorists from parking too close to him.

His fear is they may scratch his precious paintwork when they open their doors or try to manoeuvre supermarket trolleys through the gap between their cars.

But there’s nothing deliberate about the positioning of that modest Ford Focus outside Sainsbury’s, Saturday after Saturday, when it’s time for the Utleys’ weekly shop. On the contrary, the driver’s failure to park neatly between the white lines of the bay is a source of constant distress and humiliation to him.

Reader, there’s a clue in the L-plates. For the driver in question is not me but the beloved youngest of our four sons, whom I’ve been trying to teach how to reverse into a parking space — alas, with little success so far.

Reluctance

It was last autumn, after he had twice failed his driving test, when I felt I could dodge my paternal responsibilities no longer. I had helped teach two of his older brothers to drive (son number three, mercifully, has shown no interest) — and I suspect other parents may understand my reluctance to repeat the experience.

Indeed, there are few duties of parenthood more nerve-racking than sitting in the front passenger seat beside our learner offspring, desperately worried that they’re going to hit someone or something, but anxious not to shatter their confidence by showing our terror.

How many of us have found ourselves stamping instinctively on imaginary brakes in the passenger footwell, sucking in breath through our teeth or trying to laugh off some dreadful mistake? ‘Whoops! What was that, Dad?’ ‘Ha! Ha! Don’t worry. You just drove over that rather high kerb when you turned the corner. But carry on, you’re doing fine,’ (and never mind that you’ve just jarred your father’s spine, almost given him a heart attack and knocked ten years off the life of the car’s rear suspension).

After countless such incidents with his older brothers, I reckoned my nerves weren’t up to going through it all over again with son number four. So instead, I left it all to the professionals, shelling out a fortune in lessons and thinking it cheap at the price to let someone else take the strain.

Indeed, I rank driving instructors among the bravest of the brave, not far behind the Armed Forces.

But when the lad failed for the second time, my conscience got the better of me — that, and my fear of paying for more lessons until the crack of doom (not to mention driving tests — at £85 a pop, including the written theory paper, which expires after two years).

As the youngest, he had always had the worst deal from his dad. By the time he came along, I’d long grown sick of reading The Very Hungry Caterpillar and Boris The Birthday Mole to small boys, leaving the bedtime storytelling mostly to his mother.

I’d also run out of money for the private schools where his two oldest brothers went, while most of his clothes were hand-me-downs.

After all that, I realised it would be brutally unfair to deny him the driving practice I’d given the others. So I bit the bullet, coughed up another small fortune to add him to the car’s insurance — and so began our weekly adventures in Sainsbury’s car park.

Determined

In the boy’s defence, I should say he’s pretty competent at driving forwards, give or take the occasional stalling of the engine and crashing of gears. Indeed, there are moments when I feel almost relaxed sitting beside him, breaking into a cold sweat only a couple of times as we tootle along the roads around our home.

It’s only when it comes to reverseparking that I wonder why on earth his driving instructor thought him ready to take his test (or is he just determined to swell the Government’s coffers, at £85 a time?)

Enough to say that he just hasn’t quite got the hang of it yet, turning the steering wheel clockwise when he should be turning it anti-clockwise — and then telling me I’m wrong when I try to put him right. ‘No, Dad, that’s not how my instructor tells me to do it. You’d fail if you did it your way in the test.’

The difference is that when I do it my way, the car ends up squarely in the middle of the marked bay, where it is meant to be. When he does it his way, even after five attempts, it ends up at a rakish angle, straddling two bays.

And unless there’s a shortage of spaces (in which case, we swap places and I re-park the car myself) we tend to leave it like that. The point to grasp is that we don’t do it on purpose.

It’s those who do it deliberately — the Clarkson parkers — who have raised such a storm this week. This was after a 24year-old from Doncaster was named and shamed on a Facebook page, headed ‘Parking like a t**t’, for hogging two bays with his £ 16,000 second- hand Astra GTC VXR.

With apparently unconscious irony, Luke Varley defends himself for parking so badly by saying he always straddles two bays to protect his car from ‘clowns who can’t park or drive’. He has done it, he says, ever since someone parked too close to him, damaging his car and driving off without leaving a note.

Frustrating

The controversy has divided the nation. Surprising numbers — mostly men, I notice — have expressed sympathy for Mr Varley, including some who say that parking bays are too narrow for today’s wider cars.

Others have pointed out that since 1954, around the time when many car parks were laid out, the waistline of a typical British male has grown from 34in to 37in, making it hard for fatter drivers and passengers to get in and out of cars if others are parked in adjoining bays.

The only answer, they argue, is to grab two spaces.

I have to say I’m in the opposite camp. Since few experiences are more frustrating than driving around endlessly searching for a parking place, it strikes me as shockingly mean- spirited of drivers deliberately to occupy two. And aren’t there far more important things in life to worry about than the faint risk of the odd scratch to a car’s paintwork?

But then Clarkson parking bears the authentic stamp of this selfish and materialist world, in which so many seem to have forgotten the golden rule that we should behave towards others as we would wish them to treat us.

If you want to know what I mean, try taking a learner driver for a spin in 2017. When I was learning, more than 40 years ago, other road-users were considerate to drivers with L-plates, showing patience when they stalled, crashed their gears or had trouble parking.

Today, in London at least, they are utterly merciless, flashing their lights, honking their horns, tailgating and flicking V-signs at them if they make the slightest mistake. Have they all forgotten that they were once learners themselves?