As I write this, I'm sat on the sofa in my mum and dad's house in West Cork, having just driven here from my own home in Belfast.
My youngest son is driving my dad demented with requests to go out and play in the garden, even though it's teeming with rain (of course it is, it's a Bank Holiday weekend) and my mum has just plonked a cup of hot, fresh tea and some Jaffa Cakes next to me. The world could not be a better place, right now.
And yet. My hands are shaking, just a little. My pupils are a little dilated and my mind is racing. Why? Because for the first time, 20 years on down the line, I've just realised what a colossal cock I was.
Twenty years ago, I was in the twilight of my teens, hopping back and forth between home and college. I didn't own a car at the time - couldn't afford one - but plenty of my friends did and anyway, dear old dad always used to throw me, unquestioningly, the keys to his car, which at the time was a 2.0-litre injection Peugeot 405. Now, by West Cork standards, in the mid-nineties, this was the four-wheeled equivalent of an Exocet missile. Fast, with fluid handling and sharp Pininfarina good looks, let's just say I drove it in the appropriate fashion. Which is to say a wildly inappropriate fashion.
As an example - one fine sunny day, coming back from Ballydehob to my parent's old house in Schull, I popped out across the road to overtake a trundling tractor (or the West Cork speed bump, as they're known). Just as I drew alongside, I realised with mounting horror that my windscreen was filled not with sun and endless road but the business end of the twice-daily bus to Cork. Were it not for anti-lock brakes, that Peugeot's sublime steering and some sort of dumb luck, I wouldn't be here writing this piece now.
And that's why I'm shaking a little. Not as a 20-year delayed reaction to that specific incident, but because I've just ten minutes ago driven over that very same stretch of tarmac and am now shuddering at the thought that I once regarded it as a viable overtaking spot. Sweet Jesus, was I that stupid?
To be fair to myself, I wasn't. In fact, I know damned well that amongst my fellow car nut friends I was the sensible one. In fact, it was Jackie Stewart that saved my life. While most of my mates were poring over editions of Max Power magazine and dreaming of slotting a Cosworth 2.3 into an MkII Escort shell, if ever funds would allow, I had found a dog-eared copy of JYS' Principles of Performance Driving (foreword by H.R.H. the Duke of Kent, no less). How lucky was I that some of what Jackie said and wrote sunk in to my thick head? Lessons about being smooth, rather than fast. About stroking the car and easing the steering, not trying to force or hustle. It didn't make me a good driver (I'm still pretty ham-fisted, truth be told), but it did, I think, stop me being a terrible one. If this guy, I thought at the time, won three F1 world titles when all his friends were dying in fiery crashes, he probably knows something and I should probably pay attention.
What's really changed though are the roads themselves and the cars we drive on them. That stretch where I tried to overtake the tractor was, 20 years hither, smooth and glass-like in its finish. Today, it's pitted and cratered and the road markings are almost impossible to make out in the rain. That goes for almost all of the roads I cut my teeth learning on and it's a diabolical indictment of how low on the list of road safety priorities simple road maintenance and engineering is. Almost all of the roads I learned on, and almost all of the roads I've driven on this morning, have a topography that goes road, yellow paint (usually faded), verge, ditch, tree or stone wall. There is no margin for error and those are errors that we all make, regardless of age or hot-headedness. In fact, the two worst examples of driving I saw today (tailgating and then overtaking in heavy fog, pulling out in a manner that made it obvious they hadn't looked properly) were both perpetrated by those well and truly old enough to know better.
So, what have we learned here? Drivers are hot-headed and too fast when we're young, and many of us don't improve much as the years roll by. Road maintenance is basically non-existent once you get outside The Pale. And it rains a lot in West Cork.
Thankfully, I've learned something more. Richard King, founder and CEO of Ingenie Insurance, based in the UK, recently told me that "parents generally think they've done their job if they pay for it - pay for the driving lessons, encourage you to revise for the theory test, they buy you the car and insure it. Where we see that parents get involved in the whole process of getting on the road, we've seen stats that say you're 28 per cent less likely to have a crash when parents have made it a team game. Mum and dad need to be getting far more involved in the whole process and not just handing it off to a driving instructor."
That seems like good news. I've already got a strict regimen of go-karting and off-roading planned for my two boys when they reach driving age, which is worryingly fewer and fewer years now. The only question remains - how do I train them without admitting what a high-speed berk I once was? Better drag out that Jackie Stewart book again and start leaving it lying conspicuously around...