Learning to drive

Like many of you, I’m sure, my Dad taught me to drive. He took me for my first (legal) drive the day I turned 17. And for 10 years or so, I was happily part of that 90 per cent of the population – maybe 95 per cent of young blokes – that participate in that mathematical contradiction of believing I was a well-above-average driver.

Then a Japanese chap called Tanaka taught me that I really could not drive.

This is how it happened.

By my late twenties, I had squirmed my way sufficiently up the long and well-greased pole of the Japanese automotive corporate world to have got myself into a position where I had to test various cars regularly enough, and thoroughly enough, that it was decreed I needed some formal driver training. Not that I got to do the kind of glamorous testing that generates the sorts of tales with which Messrs Frankel, Prosser, Goodwin and English regularly regale us.