“Surely there is only so much to it,” I thought as I eyed the driving instructor’s car pull up in my driveway. “I know what I’ll do, I’ll sit in for a lesson and get the basics.” At €40 an hour it’s all I could afford to do.

I had hoped the person in the car would be a female, so I could use some charm, but sadly no, a little man with a tight moustache opened the door. “Hello,” he said. “Hello,” I replied and sat in the driver’s seat.

The car was relatively new. Then I noticed two pedals on his side, the passenger side. “What are they for?” I enquired. “They’re to stop the car if I feel things are not going right.” They have it all worked out.

I started it up, it was an Ibiza, a nice, tidy small car, completely different from my own Opel Omega but the gears were the same so off we went. The instructor seemed a bit ratty and before long we were beside a curb and I had to reverse around a corner.
Wrong, the first time, wrong, the second time, wrong the third time. He decided to leave it for the next lesson. “What next lesson?” I thought.

The 90-degree turn went well and surprisingly he used his foot pedals only once. This is great, I thought. We drove up a country road at Naul and then he asked what the sign meant which was before us. I thought about it and “It’s a junction,” came out. “No,” he said, “it’s a side road of equal importance.” I did not have a clue what these road signs meant and he knew it. “What did he expect?” I thought, “it was my first lesson.”

Then he said “can you go eighty kilometres an hour in this zone?” The sign said I could but what was this he was coming out with? Eighty kilometres an hour seemed a bit fast on these roads but I accelerated to sixty to keep him happy.

The next thing he started to complain that his car was coming under unnecessary wear and tear and we had better bring the lesson to a halt. “Fair enough,” I said “but if you used the Omega you’d see what I’m used to.”

We pulled in at the driveway and he produced a list of questions that I could be asked and also a page of road signs and their meaning.

He suggested that I book six two-hour driving lessons and it was then I realized that this guy was a money grabber, because there is no way I needed that many lessons.

I was humiliated and embarrassed by the experience. Its lucky I was determined to get the test so I will book one more lesson, which is all I need along with a bit of swotting.

This time I will ask for a different instructor and hopefully there will be a bit more common sense used by the person testing me.