Free wheels on my wagon..

Some people are natural drivers.
Do you know what I mean? The sort of people you just know in your heart  were born with four wheels and an under carriage. They evolve into normal-looking human beings but you know that the original hard-wiring is there. They pass their test after four lessons which is hardly surprising since they learnt all they needed to know at the age of three by sitting on a parent's lap going through the gear levers.
It will come as no surprise that I do not fall into this category. It's genetic. My mother did not learn to drive until her mid fifties.
She expressed a desire to learn to drive when she was considerably younger. My father, game chap that he was, offered to take her for a few lessons.
These took place early in the morning when they had the Hertfordshire roads to themselves. Reassuringly, after several lessons they returned in one piece and were still talking to each other.
The lessons came to an abrupt halt, however, when my mother took lasting umbrage over my father's loss of nerve.
They returned one morning with him driving and her looking like thunder.
He later explained that she had been driving along very nicely, so nicely, he said that for a moment he'd relaxed allowing himself to look out the side window. "I'd forgotten who was driving, so I said, 'Jesus Christ!!' very loudly. Your mother thinking something was very wrong, slammed on the brakes, stalled and said that that was it." And that was indeed it for another twenty years until his premature death prompted her to learn to drive.
Whilst she never became an enthusiastic driver, she did in the early days venture forth to see friends in Potters Bar, and came home one day saying she'd inadvertently found a new route home. She said it was a marvellous new road, a three lane highway and not another soul on it. A bit disconcerting, at first, but a very speedy journey nevertheless. It turns out she was on the soon to be opened M25 . A little known fact that it was unofficially test-driven by one very careful Renault 5 driver.
She remained a very safe, immensely parochial driver until the day she died.
I too am a very parochial driver. An ardent avoider of motorways. I haven't driven for 18 months now. That's because I decided that having two cars was no longer necessary. We'd had Minis ever since the new version came out, but now with grandchildren we (Dearest) decided we needed a bigger car.
I'd never really thought about it, or felt challenged by it but when I saw car-love in Dearest's eyes I was not going to ruin it all by saying, "I'm not ever going to drive that thing.." So I kept quiet and developed a love affair of my own, with public transport.
However, now retirement is kicking in, I need to have my own set of wheels. So reading about driverless cars this week makes me falter: shall I wait until technology takes over or shall I fearlessly take to the roads once more? Looking for B roads. And in daylight hours...