I didn’t learn to drive until I was 24. Why should I? I’d lived in London all through my late teens and early twenties and it was crazy to maintain a car in the city with all the public transportation going on. My father had put his car on blocks outside our London house years ago, literally taken it off the road, so I had a good example of how to get around by train and bus.
Quite honestly today, although we have a garage and a place to park outside the flat and Malia at times feels the extra effort needed to haul herself around the corner to the bus stop too much to endure, I walk through all these car parks that ask if you’ve paid and displayed? and work out that the cost to deposit one’s car for an hour or ten must be at least as much as a bus ticket. If there is no car park then a space on the road needs to be found and a meter fed. Is it worth the expense of a car unless you’re rich and have more money than sense?
Maybe in the winter!
So, back to my driving license which was issued when I was 24 and is valid until I turn 70, or to be more precise, until the day before my 70th birthday. The license itself was paper, with no photograph and when I moved home I read the small print and discovered that I needed to notify the Driver Vehicle Licensing Agency in Glasgow of my new address.
I complied.
Back in the mail came a letter informing me that I now had to fill out a more complicated form and provide all kinds of proofs of ID along with a photograph for a brand new, de rigeur, plastic, driving license. Fortunately I had one of the new fangled passports with a chip and a serial number that negated the necessity of sending in all my personal information, birth certificate, marriage license, proof of navel and so on and so forth, so I wrote a few numbers in a box, affixed a naff photograph of me, I think it was me, and shakily signed my name in a small box with instructions to stay within the lines. The reading of this admonition caused me to panic and my signature looked like a decrepid old lady’s scratchings.
Today my new, and very portable, form of ID arrived on the doormat. I examined it and found it does indeed expire in ten years. What happened to the forever it had seemed like at the age of 24 when I was issued with a license that declared its validity until the day before I turned 70? Ten years is not forever and I was reminded of the Permanent Alien Resident Card I used to have until the powers that be decided permanent was too much of a commitment to uphold for today’s modern man. That’s the second time documents of mine have been reneged on in six months! I carefully placed my compact ID in my Vera Bradley wallet and took out my Texas license.
Then I read the large piece of paper that accompanied my license, it was called a counterfoil and on it were printed instructions to keep it in a safe place with my license since they would both have to be shown together. The one was no good without the other.
I quickly realised that neither my little wallet, or my handbag and definitely not the glove compartment of my car (which I don’t have remember?) would be considered safe places by the DVLA out of Glasgow.
I reluctantly retrieved my convenient and smallest form of ID from my keychain wallet and placed it, with its siamese twin counterfoil, in my safe to be produced simultaneously at the authorities’ pleasure.
Well hello there! My name is Vivienne McNeny.
I am an empty nester exploring life as a Boomer…you could say I'm happily Boomering along!
As a homeschooling Mum I have finally quit the job of role model and mentor to my four children. I do what I want to do, eat when I feel like it, enjoy life with my blue eyed cowboy and clean my house once a month or so whether it needs it or not!
In true English form I write about the emergence of my true identity now that I can no longer hide behind my children as their Mum.
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