There’s a theory that driving a manual car sharpens cognitive ability — in plain terms, keeps your mind sharp well into old age. But I know a better trick: go to any country that drives on the left, hire a right-hand-drive car, and your cognitive abilities will shoot through the roof in record time.
Over 12 years, I’ve driven somewhere in the region of a hundred thousand kilometres, and never once run into any real difficulty behind the wheel. I had an excellent instructor, so everything came easily to me — parking in a tight space, easy; threading through narrow Italian streets, easy; covering a thousand kilometres of motorway in a single day, no trouble at all.
But the moment I sat down behind the wheel of a right-hand-drive car, in a country that drives on the left, I was suddenly right back where I started — the exact same feeling that washed over me the very first day I ever took a learner’s car out into traffic. Back then, I remember thinking that driving must require some kind of superhuman ability I simply didn’t possess. Before this, I’d spent a couple of years riding a motorbike on the left, and even driven a right-hand-drive car a couple of hundred kilometres along the motorway without any trouble. But an actual city! No — that, clearly, was a level reserved for the chosen few.
Firstly, it turns out there’s simply no car where the right side of your body expects one — just a door, and beyond it, nothing at all. Genuinely nothing. The entire car, meanwhile, has apparently relocated itself to the left. My right side had never in its life driven quite this close to oncoming traffic, and it was, frankly, terrified. My left side, on the other hand, kept cheerfully insisting: “Relax, there’s loads of room over here.” Ha!
Secondly, there’s the manoeuvring. Any fool can drive in a straight line. But changing lanes — with motorbikes swarming everywhere, no less — is another matter entirely. Word of advice: don’t just pick any random country to sharpen your cognitive skills on; pick one without motorbikes first. The sheer terror of potentially clipping one of these small, fragile, two-wheeled creatures with an enormous slab of metal was something else entirely. And then there were the turns! I was constantly convinced I was about to scrape the entire left side of the car straight down a lamppost. And yet I kept drifting left regardless, because my left side just kept laughing it off: “Relax, there’s loads of room over here.”
And if you’re worried about mixing up the indicators and the windscreen wipers, or fumbling around for a seatbelt or gearstick that simply isn’t where you expect it — honestly, don’t be. That’s the easy part. What you might actually do, though, is climb in through the wrong door entirely, and sit there wondering where on earth the steering wheel and pedals have gone. Even that’s not the end of the world, though you will have to climb back out and switch sides — ideally while pretending you’d simply left something important in the passenger seat.
So go ahead, congratulate me: I can now reliably get in through the correct door, and I no longer confuse the indicator stalk with the wipers. That, I’m afraid, is roughly where my newfound cognitive abilities come to an end.
