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David Kennedy writes: > >And I'm sure it's been said before but you do miss an awful lot when you're >driving. > >Weird or what. Anyone noticed my absence on the mailbase over the last week? (ah well I did). Well I've been in a state of ecstatic delirium since passing my driving test on Monday at the seventh (yes 7th) attempt.( I finally worked out that if you fail to read the numberplate of a car, hit a curb, mangle the gears going up hill so you almost start going back down and do 40 in a 30 zone they pass you!). So for someone who has noticed the minutiae of life on the hoof for forty-odd years I'm over-the-moon-in-another-solar-system to be able to 'miss an awful lot'. Maybe having waited so long the pleasure is sweeter but this week being able to drive solo has been a weird and wonderful experience needless to say a nervy one. This isolation of the body in a mobile tin can is superbly unnatural and thoughts become almost audible in a way I haven't experience before. But yes as Mark pointed out poets & driving seldom go together as Peter Hodgkiss would testify as I remember him having some hilarious poet-driver yarns. And isn't Jeff Nuttall still wanted in Australian for crashing his car and 'legging' it back to England before they slammed him up? Well before I get back to fitting out the car with furry dice, nodding tigers, rosary beads and a cocktail cabinet I might add that driving also gave me my favourite poem of last year Dream Drover (A Gratton Street Irregular publication) which is about my first driving lesson which involved bombing up the hills and down the dales of the Peak District - it was mindbending and I had to go to bed for the rest of the afternoon to recover! Peep Peep Geraldine > > %%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%