It is Saturday morning, and my wife and I are taking the dog to the park. It is snowing hard, as it has been all night. As I pull the front door shut, my wife turns and throws me her keys.
“You can drive,” she says.
“We’re driving?” I say.
“I can’t drive in snow. You can,” she says. She means that because I grew up in New England I have considerable experience of driving in blizzard conditions, and this is true. For a lot of drivers, the idea that you should turn your wheels into a skid is largely theoretical: imagine being able to test it out six or seven times on your way to buy milk.
What I mean to say is: I have done every stupid thing you can do in a car in the snow, and suffered the consequences.
“Is that the only reason you wanted me to come?” I say, activating the windscreen wipers, front and rear.
“Possibly,” she says. “I just don’t know how.”
“The first rule of driving in snow,” I say, “is Maintain good visibility.” I lower the passenger window, and the wall of snow stacked against it falls into my wife’s lap.
“Cheers,” she says. I don’t tell her that the real first rule of driving in snow is: Don’t drive in the snow if you don’t have to. I turn the car and head east, with the whirling flakes piling straight into the windscreen.
“It’s actually quite deep,” I say.
“Get on with it,” my wife says.
My experience, I realise, is local and a little obsolete: I’m good at driving bad 1970s cars, with heavy engines and rear-wheel drive, on slippery surfaces. The only time these skills come in handy nowadays is when I have to push a flat-bed trolley loaded with sacks of gravel through the just-mopped lightbulb aisle at B&Q.
“With your front-wheel drive and modern antilock braking systems,” I say, “driving in snow isn’t actually that difficult.”
“Do we need to go this slowly?” my wife says.
“I sort of thought the main roads would be cleared by now,” I say.
“Cleared how?” she says. “By whom?”
My skills also rely on a high level of experience from fellow road users. I’m not happy watching other drivers around me overshoot turns and fishtail into bins.
“Everyone’s a moron,” I say. “That’s the problem.”
“Are you sure that’s the problem?” my wife says.
“I didn’t tell you this before, but the real first rule of…”
Ahead of me, two people are approaching the edge of the road on foot. I happen to know there is a pedestrian crossing there, its markings buried beneath a layer of new-fallen snow. The walkers do not appear to be together, but they are on their phones.
“They wouldn’t,” I say. But they do: they cross without looking up. I’m enraged by their inattention, even though I have braked in plenty of time – slightly early, in fact.
“I’m not sure you’re as good at this as you think you are,” my wife says.
“People are flinging themselves into the road!” I say.
“They’re not used to snow,” she says.
“Zero sense of self-preservation,” I say. “How dare you people go on about the blitz.”
“You want to be in the right lane here,” she says.
When we arrive at our destination, I park in a place where I think no others cars will be able to slide into mine, no matter how hard they try. The dog whines, wanting out.
“Well, that was a bit of an ordeal, wasn’t it?” says my wife, undoing her seatbelt.
“It will be different on the way back,” I say. “Because you will be driving.”
“No, I won’t,” she says.
“You will,” I say, handing her the keys.
“I can’t drive in snow,” she says. “I really can’t.”
“Then we shall both die,” I say.
“I’m sorry,” she says.
“Too late,” I say.
By the time we’ve completed our walk an hour later I have accepted my wife’s apology and agreed to drive home. By then the roads are mostly clear anyway, and driving in snow is probably over for at least another year.
• Hadley Freeman and Tim Dowling will be in conversation on 25 February at 8pm. Find details and £5 tickets for their live streamed event at membership.theguardian.com.
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