DRIVERS who pass their test at the first attempt should be made to do it again. It's not that they are incompetent drivers - they have passed their test, therefore they can drive - it's just that it would make the rest of us serial failures feel a bit better about our own incompetence.

As someone who failed three times (big surprise, huh?) before finally slipping under the wire unnoticed, I am naturally distrustful of anyone who passes first time.

There is something vaguely inhuman, perhaps even robotic, about people who know how to work a car from the moment their bum hits the driver's seat.

I imagine they are the same people who put their CDs in alphabetical order, know their National Insurance number off by heart and insist their (highly polished) knife and fork sit at precisely 90 degrees to the edge of the table - not 89, not 91, but 90.

It was with this thought floating aimlessly at the back of my mind a couple of days ago that I found myself congratulating my cousin for passing his test first time.

"Oh, well done," I hollered, overcompensating for my inner seething while, simultaneously, mentally crossing him off my Christmas card list. "I'm absolutely thrilled for you."

And I was, in a way. It's just that he only had eight lessons, while I easily had 80 with, strangely enough, another cousin who was a driving instructor, but who is now living it up in the Seychelles on the money he made from teaching me to drive.

As if that wasn't nauseating enough, my fledgling driver cousin has only just blown out the 17 candles on his Wallace and Gromit birthday cake and he can already parallel park without so much as breaking into a sweat.

I, on the other hand, am precisely double his age and have been driving for as long as he has been alive and yet I still will choose to drive six miles out of my way to avoid having to parallel park.

It wasn't part of the test when I took it, thank goodness, or I would still be careering round with L-plates on to this day.

Like rollerblading and macram, parallel parking is something I just can't do. And, let me clear this one up once and for all, just because you say "but it's so-o-o easy" at me in a loud, patronising voice, doesn't magically mean I can do it. Just like saying "but it's so-o-o good for you" won't make me eat tofu.

This doesn't mean I'm a bad driver. After 17 years of practice, I think it's safe to say I am no longer a danger on the roads.

This of course implies that I once was.

Well, feel free to judge for yourselves. On my first test, I hit a bus. I didn't hit it hard, but I hit it.

On my second test, I had to swerve gracelessly to miss an old lady and ended up on the kerb with the front end of the car wedged under a rhododendron bush.

Need I go on?

Oh, okay, if you insist. On my third test, taken with the understandably nervous examiner I had for my first test, I almost caused a pile-up by juddering out into the main flow of traffic and grinding to an undignified halt with much snorting and swearing (not all of it from me).

Things didn't much improve after I passed my test. For the first couple of years, my car spent more time being repaired in the garage than it did on the roads, which was probably a blessing for other drivers.

On one particularly memorable day, I had not one but two accidents (one my fault, one not) when I took out a woman driver's brake lights at a roundabout and, no more than 45 minutes later, was squashed by a reversing lorry.

Oh, happy days.

But, fingers crossed, touch wood, turn round three times and spit on the floor for luck, I have not hit, squashed or smashed anything now for the best part of 15 years.

So, anyone want a lift?

Updated: 09:54 Monday, July 12, 2004