How I Drove Away My Anxiety

When a car became a necessity in our new French home town, I had to beat an irrational fear.

At a certain point I realised I’d forgotten how to drive. It happened during my eighth or ninth year of living in Paris, when we were invited to a wedding which — not unusually in France — was in the middle of nowhere and inaccessible by public transport.

We would have to rent a car. Which, obviously, would mean driving it. Trouble was, I hadn’t driven regularly for over a decade. I’d hit the road from time to time in London, and (ironically, given my later circumstances) even owned a Citroën 2CV for a while. But when I moved to Paris I took one glance at the way people drove and decided it wasn’t for me. Plus, parking in Paris was a nightmare and, on my salary, buying a car would have been an outrageous extravagance.

In short, I put a brake on driving. Never mind that I’d passed the test at 17 and spent years bombing a red Mini around the Wiltshire countryside, where I made my debut in journalism. That guy was a different person.

In the run-up to the wedding I pledged to take some lessons and reclaim my motoring mojo. “Some” lessons became one. The instructor was young, rather macho in his leather jacket, and yelled at me for driving too close to the side of the road. For me that was hardly surprising, as I’d last driven in the UK and felt as though I was on the wrong side of the car.

When he took me on the motorway, I was terrified.

I got back to our apartment with my nerves jangling and knocked back two glasses of wine. It was eleven in the morning.

Cut to last year, when we moved from Paris to Montélimar, a small town on the fringes of Provence. We swapped our cramped apartment for a house with a garden. We exchanged pollution for fresh air, swept clean by the mistral wind.

But there was a downside to the deal. When you’re surrounded by countryside, you need a car.

We bought a second-hand Toyota Yaris. As automatics seemed to be as rare as they were expensive, she was a manual. Stick shift, you might say. We christened her “Clarisse” and I prepared to get behind the wheel. But first, lessons would be required. Again.

Enter Fabien, the sole instructor at a tiny “auto-école” in the centre of town. Small and slight, with a mop of dark hair, black drainpipe jeans and a black shirt, he smoked roll-ups between lessons and had a gentle, unbothered speaking voice. His eyes were often bloodshot, as if he’d slept badly or the smoke from his ciggies had irritated them.

“Teach me as if I was starting from scratch,” I told him, and in his relaxed way he complied.

Fabien, with infinite patience, coaxed my driving skills back to life. I still drove too close to the side of the road now and then, but he warned me calmly, without panic, often with only a gesture.

Soon we were able to have brief conversations. I learned that Fabien was also a musician — he played guitar — and that his favorite band was Pink Floyd.

Finally, after twelve lessons, he told me I’d be fine.

I took his word for it. Except I was still anxious. The car sat in the driveway, gently mocking me as I avoided going near it. In the end, my wife broke the spell. She had an important Zoom meeting that coincided with picking our son up from school. This time there was no escape: I would have to do some motorised parenting.

I got behind the wheel, sweating slightly. Ignition. Mirror. Signal. Manœuvre. You can do this! The GPS directed me without incident to the school and, as I’d arrived ridiculously early, there were still plenty of parking spaces.

I met my son outside the school gates and drove him home. When I turned off the engine, with a flood of relief, I asked him: “So how did I do?”

“Pretty good. Smooth.”

A few days later I drove with my wife to a tiny village: weathered grey stones and brightly flowered window boxes under the spring sunshine. We found a little restaurant and I ate one of the best entrecôte steaks I’d ever tasted. The view from the window was of fields and the distant Ardèche mountains. “This is why you need to drive,” I told myself.

But there’s more to it than that. For the past few days my wife has been in Paris. This morning I drove to the station to meet her. A simple thing that would have filled me with dread a year ago. For some reason, being able to do it now, with confidence, was the best treat of all.

I will never be a true fan of cars and driving. That hasn’t changed. But I did learn that, if you give yourself a gentle push and put your trust in the right person, you can shake off the fears that sometimes block life’s highway.