Within minutes of arriving in Stoke (see entry of March 30), I found myself in the driver's seat of a loaned vehicle -- an old, weary Nissan Micra -- veering down the left-hand side of the road for the first time in this existence of mine, staring ahead in terrified concentration, hands clutching the steering wheel in classic white-knuckle fashion. Planted in what would be the front passenger seat in the States, giving me little sense of the car's left side in relation to the edge of the pavement. Leading to curb-scraping moments frequent enough that my hostess/guardian angel, seated next to me, began crying out "Not so close!" every few minutes. (Followed immediately by, "Sorry! You're doing great! Really!" So sweetly English.)
The steering had zero power-assistance, meaning turns required full-body exertion, me pulling desperately on the wheel, praying I'd make it around the next corner without leaving skidding tire furrows across nearby front yards. My guardian angel -- not a car owner, driving infrequently -- traded off driving duty with me, producing turns identical to mine (wide, looping, flirting with zipping off the road), moments whose comic value I appreciated far more when someone else's hands were on the wheel.
I don't know about the rest of the U.K., but at some point folks in the Stoke area made a decision to use traffic circles in lieu of stop lights. Meaning roundabouts can be found everywhere, in gleefully excessive overabundance. Big multi-laned circles and cute little toy-sized buggers. Which actually seem to work pretty well, most folks yielding courteously to the car to the right, a display of manners in wild contrast with the general free-for-all around Boston-area rotaries where drivers tend toward the "hit the accelerator, lean on the horn, ignore everyone else" method. Kind of nice after I began acclimating. Not many red lights to sit at, though I appreciated the few I encountered as opportunities to unwrap hands from steering wheel, take a calming breath, wipe perspiration from forehead.
I don't have or need a car here in Madrid. The local drivers seem to approach getting around like a hopped-up videogame, local mass transit meets all my needs. So I haven't voluntarily piloted something on four wheels since last autumn, back in the low-pressure universe of northern Vermont. Not that Stoke-on-Trent is high pressure. It's just that there's a difference between rolling sedately along unpaved (or paved) country roads and flying down city thoroughfares, squirting in and out of traffic circles every thirty seconds, trying not to cause pile-ups among fellow motorists as I frantically attempt to master the left-handed gear-shifting thing while fending off the panicky impulse to slip back into the right-hand lane, where nature intended me to be.