Photo credit: Marc Smith
I clearly remember the first time I drove a car. The driving instructor pulled up outside my house in a silver Corsa and I wobbled down to it on unsteady legs as I prepared for the uncertain pleasure of trying to control a lump of metal for the first time.
However, do you remember the first time you ever got in a car? In my case it would have been one of my uncle’s old rust buckets. My parents don’t drive but my Uncle Billy took us to the caravan park we were staying in for a summer holiday many moons ago.
I have no idea what make or model it was. All I know is that it smelled of petrol. I would love to be able to use my time machine to go back and see what the UK’s roads were like then. Clearly there were a lot less cars on the roads then. I saw a statistic recently that said that traffic has increased by 25% in the last 15 years and that is what got me thinking about this in the first place.
Where Is the Traffic?
The first time I got in a car was probably closer to 30 years ago. Can you imagine how quiet the roads must have been back then? These days it can be difficult to find a clear, open stretch of road to drive on.
Now, whenever I find a piece of road like this I store it mentally in my list of places to come back to. I wonder whether other people think like me and long for a return of the days when it was a surprise to come across another car travelling in the opposite direction. I initially assumed that everyone else was like me and hated traffic but then I remembered that there are people who like trousers which appear on the point of falling off, tongue piercings, unfeasibly spicy food and Vin Diesel films, so my opinion isn’t always the most common one.