Do all women in the driving seat get treated like this? – Susan Morrison

Susan Morrison and her husband take the train to York after she decides their long marriage would not make it past Thistly Cross roundabout in a car.

Some couples get on fine with a woman driving, even if this photo is posed by models (Picture: Getty Images/iStockphoto)

It’s the sighing that gets to you. They sigh. Men, that is. Well, that’s a bit of a generalisation. Married men, then. That’s still a bit on the sweeping side. Let’s narrow it down. Men I am actually married to. OK, then. The man.

That’s who sighs whenever they sit in the passenger seat of a car I am driving.

He was a prisoner of the passenger seat for a spell a week or so back. This meant I had to chauffeur him about.

He sighs in a pointed and heavy way when I turn left and fail to ­indicate, even if it is ten past two in the morning and the only other ­vehicle on the road near us is a milk lorry leaving Dunfermline.

I have heard him sigh when I have applied the brakes in a manner that can only be described as savage. Yes, I’ll grant you the anchors were slammed on sharpish. A brightly coloured football had just bounced into the road before my very eyes. The Tufty Club trained me well. I never cross the road without looking right, left and right again, but we all know that small boys and footballs are a dangerous combination in a road ­traffic situation.

‘There’s a bus’

In addition, I performed this ­emergency stop only after glancing in the mirror and checking that there were no vehicles behind me, thus ensuring that the manoeuvre could be carried out in safety.

The reason I could control the car so well is because I passed my driving test decades ago, and this is not the first time I have brought the car to a shuddering halt, so you can dispense with the sighing, amigo.

He points things out, like: “There’s a bus.”

I know. I can see the bus. I can also see that the bus driver’s eyes are bloodshot, because the bus is taking up my entire windscreen. The bus is on my side of the road because some plonker has dumped a 4x4 in the ­middle of Ferry Road under the mistaken belief that just stopping a car passes for parking.

The bus driver and I will now do that slo-mo tango of car and bus negotiating past each other on a busy road without scratching the paintwork.

He thinks I can’t see

He mutters directions like “I’d have turned right here”. Well, I wouldn’t. I’m in the driving seat, quite literally, and if I chose to have a day of only turning left in some weird objection to right-wing politics then I can. Also, I was slightly lost, but I wouldn’t tell him that.

Then there’s the leg twitching. He thinks that I can’t see it, but I can. He’s looking for the brakes and the accelerator. His legs leap about like someone doing Irish dancing barefoot on hot sand.

And that, friends, is why we went to York by train. One journey in the car from our house to Asda convinced me that our long marriage would not make it past Thistly Cross ­roundabaout if he was in the passenger seat.