For a while now, I’ve been taking the occasional manual drive, usually when Y takes my car out or his car is blocking mine and I’m too lazy to move them around. Since that very first adventure, I’ve taken maybe half a dozen trips and following my two latest episodes, am happy to declare that I am now a confident manual car driver.
I said I was confident, I didn’t say I was perfect.
I have a phobia with stopping on slopes. It’s called balancing, if memory serves me well, and I suck at it. Actually, I think it’s more like a mental block. Like everyone else, I learnt how to do it when I was taking my driver’s license. Unlike most people, I didn’t have to do it during my on-the-road test because the traffic light on the slope stayed green and I went right through without having to stop and balance.
At the time I thought I was the luckiest test-taker in the world, not having to do the one thing I was least confident about. Then karma came back to wipe the smug smile off my face because I’ve been terrified of balancing ever since.
Until now. My two latest episodes have seen me getting caught on slopes a bunch of times and although I confess to embarrassing revs once or twice, I didn’t panic and I didn’t get into an accident. I didn’t even get honked at. Clap clap. I think I even enjoy driving manual. Most of the time, anyway.
20/1/09: I drove the manual to work for the first time ever today!
