Can't drive, won't drive

When people ask me why I can't drive, I feel personally affronted. I can drive. I'm an excellent driver. I just don't appear able to drive to the required standards of those mean and frankly nit-picking dullards at the DVLA who've failed me on seven occasions.

This doesn't mean I couldn't take us both on a exhilarating Thelma & Louise-style road trip right now, round the M25, negotiating several lanes of busy traffic then past Trafalgar Square at rush hour. I can make a car 'move forwards' and pretty much always 'stop' when it's meant to and I know about the various pedals and the indicating lights. But this won't wash with the Metropolitan traffic police when they pull me over and ask for 'documents' and I reach in my handbag and try to fob them off with a Pret A Manger receipt for a pole-caught tuna baguette. 'You shouldn't be allowed to drive after seven tests, even if you pass,' the model David Gandy said to me the other day. David, as both a lover of vintage cars and someone who is alive and not squashed flat by me on a zebra crossing, perhaps has a salient point.

Back when I took my first driving test in the 1990s, I was convinced that I was born to drive. I started lessons on my 17th birthday and had access to a cute turquoise Fiat Uno, which I hammered around the back lanes of rural Cumbria, my father gripping the dashboard and honking on his asthma inhaler, my L-plates flapping in the g-force. By the age of 17 and eight weeks, my instructor had spotted my 'supreme road confidence' and put me in for a test. Twenty-five minutes after leaving the test centre I was stood, back by the vending machines, weeping into a fail slip given for speeding, incorrect use of the handbrake and not checking my mirrors.

The second test was even worse. 'Incorrect road positioning' and failing to give way to a bus (the stupid driver was eating a sausage roll at a round-about! Like I should wait while he fills his face). 'You drive like you've been on the road 20 years,' my dad snapped. In truth, it was hard to say whether he was angrier about the endless driving lessons or the bill for the set of wrought-iron gates I'd reversed into on a local housing estate, while practising my 'reverse round a corner' manoeuvre. This technically wasn't my fault. Who leaves gates outside a house, just flapping?

On my third test I arrived in spectacles and no make-up, wearing an outfit that Velma from Scooby-Doo would have rejected as frumpy, in a bid to show that I was a quiet, law-abiding, meek sort who would probably only use a car to deliver church pamphlets. I set off slowly, drove like an 80-year-old on my way to pick up Cliff Richard tickets and was failed for 'lack of road confidence' and 'holding up traffic by dithering at road junctions'.

By this point my driving was a running joke with my friends and family and, to add insult to injury, the boys at my school who'd taught themselves to drive by hot-wiring Sierra Cosworths were passing first time and parping their horns at me as I stood scowling at the bus stop. 'Short skirt, Wonderbra, perfume,' a female friend said to me on the eve of my fourth test. Sadly, I can confirm that the DVLA is not prepared to overlook clipping a wing mirror and driving with the handbrake on, even if you are dressed like you're off to an open audition for Spearmint Rhino.

I don't remember much about tests five or six, although I do recall lying in the foetal position, weeping, as I listened to Hatful of Hollow by The Smiths afterwards, feeling like the world had conspired against me. There's also a week of memories spent on a residential driving course in Chester that I've shifted to a box marked 'never to be revisited, too painful'.

'Grace isn't born to drive, she's born to be driven,' my mother tells her friends loftily when the subject arises of why her thirty-something daughter still needs to be collected from the station. In a funny way, I think this is true. I still don't drive, but for 15 years I've lived in London where not driving makes perfect sense. There's far too much fun to be had in London without worrying about parking spaces, traffic jams, drink-drive limits and getting your beloved Saab scratched by a bored teenager. I have none of this tedium. And, recession-wise, I don't have a car, so I don't worry about the social humiliation of it being taken off me or what the neighbours will whisper if I downgrade.

These days I've got a cab account linked to an iPhone app in my pocket so the drivers can find me by satnav, whisk me from a tipsy party to my front door in three clicks of a screen while playing Luther Vandross (and they don't even mind if I sing along). I think I've got the best deal here. 'But Grace, you can't let this beat you!' female friends say. 'Think of the Saudi women who aren't allowed to drive. You're giving up your right. Don't you feel guilty?' I usually tell them straightfaced that I'm thinking of taking lessons again, but much more confidently this time, near their homes, at about 3.30pm when the schools are emptying out. That tends to shut them up. ES