My mum recently bought a new car and so very kindly decided to give me her old one. Will definitely be useful for when we're no longer living in London anymore (hopefully early April-ish).

Anyhoo, I sorted the tax and insurance and today was the day to get to the streets of Stevenage (Dear everybody who was out on the streets of Stevenage today: SORRY).

In my mind me and mum (my helpful navigator/constructive critic) would be out on the roads at 8 am in order to not have to actually deal with any bloody traffic. Everybody wins!

But no. I thought something was amiss when she texted me the other day to propose I drive us to Clacton (ie that place that's recently been threatened with a tidal storm or somesuch).

That didn't materialise in the end but we did wind up going out into Saturday traffic at half 11 this morning (good old beta blocker saved my nerves' day) and I drove for an hour, then we had a walk and lunch and then I went on the motorway!

Only a few mishaps really. My gear changes were rough to start with and I braked in the manner of a learner driver a couple of times. I skidded on a roundabout after misinterpreting another driver's actions and finally on the way home from Royston Tesco (don't say I don't go to the classiest places) a car broke down two cars in front of me on the freaking dual carriageway!

Cue being at a standstill on an otherwise fast-moving dual carriageway. The people in the car were mildly elderly and my mum suggested we could potentially pull over to see if they needed a push. I feel kinda bad but I had bright sun in my eyes, proclaimed I wasn't the right person to help and drove off after seeing they'd managed to pull into some dual carriageway slip road parking bay thingy (gold star for my roadway terminology).

I was relieved to get back to my mum's house to be honest. A lot came back to me but I'm dealing with six years of driving rustiness and anxiety so didn't really enjoy it. I am very proud of myself though.

Happy new year all. Still thinking of Stepfordtart a lot...

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