Cue card

The skill I'd like to describe is driving a manual car, which I realise sounds fairly mundane, but it was genuinely the hardest practical thing I've learned. I learned it at twenty-three, later than most people here, and for an entirely unromantic reason: I'd taken a job that involved visiting clients in villages with two buses a day, so it was drive or resign. What made it difficult was not the theory, which is trivial, but the coordination. There's a moment when you have to release the clutch and press the accelerator at rates that don't match each other, and for about six weeks my feet simply refused to cooperate. I stalled at a set of traffic lights so many times that I began to recognise the drivers behind me. What made it worse was that everyone around me had learned at seventeen and found the whole thing unremarkable, so there was nobody to be bad at it with. Looking back, I'm oddly proud of it, and not really because of the driving. It was the first time as an adult that I'd been visibly incompetent at something in public and kept going anyway. I'd got used to only attempting things I was already reasonably good at, and this broke that habit — which has turned out to be far more useful than the licence.