Shortly, my first driving lesson with Tom. He has an old Mazda Astina that he was gifted, much better than the shebang's I was driving at his age, but still with a lot of mileage under the bonnet.

We'll go to the nearby industrial area where, hopefully, the workers will have gone home and left us the streets to drive on. We might need lots of leeway, this being only his third time behind the wheel.

One blessing is that its automatic, so no messing around with a clutch. The manual gearbox seems to be on the way out, a shame, because shifting through the gears and developing a deft relationship between clutch and accelerator was one of the joys of driving.

Here we go.

Exhibit A, in black.