My neck is getting shorter. Is that what happens, when you get older?

It was never quite ‘racehorse’ but I'm convinced it's retracting.

Someone in authority should be telling us about these things! There should be a leaflet!

Looking over my shoulder to reverse park takes more effort than before. It requires an ‘ehh’ – one of those involuntary escapes of sound.

What’s to be done about this loss of flexibility?

The Buddhist Big Sister wants to sign me up for ‘hot yoga’.

She has a mate of a mate of a mate who will get her a discount and ‘it’ll do as your Christmas present’.

I’m not doing hot yoga. I’d rather give up driving. I got shot of my car a year ago and I haven’t missed it.

But I make for a bad passenger. This was proved at the weekend on a run out to Finsthwaite.

The Mother Superior drove us to High Dam for a ‘nice relaxing walk with the kids’.An oxymoron if ever there was one.

There's something about being in the passenger seat that turns me into Senior Driving Instructor.

But you have to be subtle these days; for domestic harmony’s sake.

She whizzed quickly through a narrow gap – wing mirrors a fly’s leg from hitting the drystone wall. I stamped in the footwell – my feet searching for brakes that aren’t there.

“Close shave there dear,” I spluttered..

She drives faster than me but then hesitates at crucial moments, like junctions.

"Go. You can go. Go now!” I’ll suggest.

Instead she cranks the handbrake and we wait. Cars go past. Then tractors, caravans, a learner driver and a man on a unicycle, juggling.

On the home leg I drove us.

"Slow down!" she screamed, face contorted and hanging onto the roof handles.

I was doing 24mph. I abhor speeding motorists so this is the worst insult.

Having children slows you down. You become militant towards speeding drivers.

I’d admire boy racers more if they had better taste in music.

Like Bob Dylan rather than DUFF! DUFF! DUFF! DUFF!

You are not cool, we see you and we laugh inside.

I’m not a perfect driver because my brain gets blasé.

The Mother Superior still bears the scars of ‘that time on the way to Edinburgh’.

This was in my ‘pre long-distance glasses’ days. I was happily tootling along on a dual carriageway and inadvertently ended up neck-and-neck with a juggernaut.

The wild Scottish lorry driver obviously misread the situation as some kind of ‘Sassenach’ duel.

He wouldn’t budge, we were going too fast to pull back and our lane was rapidly diminishing into a wall of traffic cones.

It was a frantic ‘race to hell’ and my life flashed before my eyes – I have to admit it didn’t amount to much.

Our romantic relaxing break began with her picking her fingernails out of the dashboard and me in the bar with post traumatic stress disorder.