My name is Amy and I can't drive

I’m sighing loudly and crossing my legs as yet another service station shrinks into the distance behind us, and my other half is staring pointedly forward, mouth set. This is a sensible direction to stare given he’s driving us up the M1, but I know his grimace is also because he’s gearing up to utter the full stop to all of our motorway conversations. Which goes something like this: “When you drive, as many loo breaks as you desire. Until then...”

I could have been motoring to toilet freedom, to unlimited possibility, to the shops, for 11 years now. I got as far as collecting the provisional license form on my 17^th birthday, and left it in the pub. My name is Amy. I’m 28, and I can’t drive. I’d ask for a group hug, but I think I might be the only one.

How has this happened? At 17, living at home, I was happy to cope with one bus an hour if it meant I could use the lesson fee for more pressing matters - like booze to drink in club queues while waiting to get turned away for looking 12. At university, I was predictably skint and then I picked up the boy, moved to London and took the tube every day. I cope.

But now and then, while arranging festival travel with friends, or knocking over small children on the bus with my Tesco bags, suspecting a Fiat-driving youth is preparing to shout, “Bus stop w****r!” I get a twinge that I haven’t quite caught up. I'm drifting towards the rest of adulthood with a mortgage, a fiancé, a loosely termed 'career', but I am still at the mercy of unreliable public transport and expensive taxis.

If nothing else, it loses me valuable argument ground. Much in the way I whine, “You don’t understand!” to non-smokers who tut at my on-off habit, my non-driving status means I’m unable to comment on anyone’s skill or lack of. Even I know you shouldn’t sit in the middle lane assuming it’s the ‘medium’ between fast and inside, but, y’know, they’re giving me a lift.

Given I refuse to wash our heavy casserole dish as it’s “too awkward”, it’s fair to say I am scared of things that are a bit hard. Ever contrary though, things that are really hard, I seem to throw myself at with abandon. Terrified, I quit a job I hated giving myself a month to find something else, and it worked. I ended a long term relationship and jumped into a new one a week later, and that worked too. Apparently, I am a girl of extremes. I can throw a steady income down the drain, but I cannot scrub an iron pan.

It’s getting increasingly difficult to imagine myself behind the wheel as time passes, and every journey with the boy carries an unspoken accusation of laziness. But much like the giving up smoking thing, and the pile of washing up, I continually bleat, ‘I will at some point, honest!’ Erm, but not now - we have a wedding to save for. That would just be silly.