"I feel like your father," Shane said to Roberta, while the good Doctor Freud punched the air in his grave.

This utterance occurred briefly after we had gassed up somewhere in southeast England while heading towards the seaside. Shane had handed the keys my way, after my (quite successful) navigation around London. Not feeling quite up to driving, I asked Bertie if she fancied a spin on the left hand side of the road, seeing as we were headed to the ferry day after tomorrow.

With less than a hundred miles of English country roads to drive, it seemed the chivalrous thing to do.

Roberta took the keys with the enthusiastic delight with which she approaches everything, and slung into the driver's seat while Shane grimaced.

Shane's grimace, which I originally tout was due to my radio choices over the past two hours (BBC Radio One, FTW), quickly turned to white knuckles once Roberta spun onto the road.

I must say, from the backseat, Roberta took to driving on the left like a fish to water. She took to the speed limit, held her own while weaving between parked cars and oncoming traffic which was swe rving into our lane. She gracefully worked the clutch, popping into neutral on any downhill to turn our Panda into a roller coaster.

Things, however, must have looked different up front.

"You're on the curb!" Shane would exclaim. "There's a car on your left. Budge right. Budge right. Budge right. Oh god! Go thirty!"

The speed limit fluctuated between forty and fifty.

"Mind the wobbly girl on the bicycle," he pointed out, as a youngster rode confidently down the sidewalk,  "and don't hit the girl crossing the road." The young lady was blocks away, perhaps crossing a road we would never come across.

Things got properly exciting during Roberta's first roundabouts.

"Slower. Slower. Slower." By this, he really meant 'don't enter the roundabout at sixty'. Roberta handled the first roundabout with panache.

Shane did the same thing at the next intersection. It wasn't a roundabout, but a side street.

"You sound like my father, teaching me to drive," Roberta remarked.

Shane agreed.