We were in the second year of art school, so, right in the thick of congratulating ourselves. A year away after leaving home, shaken by the realisation we were expected to wring something creative from a life as yet undented by experience, but still a year to go before graduating and being forced to gaze into this swampish adult abyss of meal deals and grunt. Anyway, we were in the second year of art school when a production company arrived with two battered Robin Reliants. What they wanted to do, they said, was pit the design students and fine art students against each other, in a competition to renovate the cars, for telly. Fun!
Hang on, I’ve just found the website. Nothing is ever lost, we all float down here. It was a show called Car Sharks. “One week to turn their bangers into beauties, their lemons into peaches and then flog the motors for as much dosh as they can make… We’ve got teams of vicars, nightclub promoters, drag queens and rugby players. This is a makeover show like no other.” Spoiler: it was a makeover show like many, many others. So the designers gave their Robin Reliant a polish, added some more mirrors, quite nice.
What we did, and bless us, with all the earnestness a group of art students could muster after a night of £1.50 vodka and cranberries at Hector’s House, was transform its “soul”, mainly because it would only cost £50 and we could spend the rest of the budget at the Pav Tav. First, we had a psychometric reading done on the car, except accidentally arranged it in the busiest cruising ground in Brighton, where a boy in hotpants asked us politely to move on because we were confusing trade. Then we had the car ordained as a priest, and stuck it in the quad at college, calling it a confessional booth. The things it heard.
Then we took it up to Beachy Head with an exorcist who cleansed it of bad spirits, except, on the way home, my friend Paddy driving, we turned a corner and the car flipped over, banged into a second car, then the wall of a pub. The car was written off. Rather than taking us to hospital, the production company plopped us down in the pub we’d crashed into, and bought us whisky. The following day we watched the car get crushed into a cube the size of a cereal packet, and all this is a long way of explaining why I don’t drive.
I mean, it’s probably not that simple. There’s also the detail that, growing up in London with a tube station a second away it never really occurred to me to learn, and also that I have the spatial awareness of a penguin that’s just woken up. But all this does mean that reading the news that driving has declined dramatically over the past 20 years gives me some pleasure. While just under half of 17- to 20-year-olds had licences between 1992 and 1994, that dropped to 29% by 2014. And the number of 21- to 29-year-olds with licences also decreased, from 75% to 63%. My people. My people! We who walk, we who can win an argument about the environment in fewer than two sentences, we who transport ourselves publicly, we who roll our eyes at the bus tourists on a rail replacement service, their eyes hungry for more wonder as they point at the Nike trainer on top of the bus-stop like it’s a nest of rare eggs. It’s been there for eight years, babe, keep up. Used to be two of them.
Before she died, my grandma gave us her car, on the understanding that I’d learn to drive it. Hurricane Irene, we called it, until its wheel fell off on the motorway. I’ve listened with interest to the stories of friends who started driving the second they became pubic, simply to be able to escape the confines of their one-bus racist town, and all the freedom and revolution that came with a hand-me-down Fiesta. I’ve been the recipient of a pointed Christmas present from my mother, a book called something like, Get Over Yourself and Learn to Drive Eva It’s Not Cute or Clever and It’s Just Getting Silly Now.
This week, my three-year-old chuckled at something in a story, and snorted: “I didn’t know mummies could drive!” At which point my mum looked at me with her eyebrows somewhere up around the curtain rail, and I in turn, shook my head.
No. Sure, it’s embarrassing, sometimes, having to Blanche DuBois about the place, relying on the kindness of strangers to ferry us to the airport, but I’ll suck it up if it means I don’t have to actively worry about mowing down a pensioner because I get scared of a lorry. Besides, I am very much one for being looked after. And I’m happy to give the precious gift of being able to look after me to those I love. The joy of taking me to Aldi. The unbuyable elation that comes from letting me sleep on the way back from Gloucester. I continue to work hard in order to give my boyfriend this comfort. Perhaps this is what my art tutors meant when they said I was driven.
Email Eva at e.wiseman@observer.co.uk or follow her on Twitter @EvaWiseman
