L is for L PLATES, LAZY and LOVE, Lots of it - which is sometimes all that gets you through the most horrible bits of your son's teenage years.

You know you love your son really - why else would you be kangaroo-hopping down a country lane while he tries - and fails - to find second gear?

If you thought potty training was bad. Or teaching him to tie his shoelaces. Or even fractions or his part in the school play - it is nothing, absolutely nothing compared to teaching them to drive.

Even when, as mine did, they're being properly taught elsewhere and you're just taking them out for practice, it is a terrifying experience.

You come home with your hands clenched from clutching an imaginary steering wheel, your leg muscles quivering from slamming down on imaginary brakes and your jaw muscles in spasms from trying to smile when all along you've really wanted to scream "SLOW DOWN! STOP!"

I had this theory that the boys should know the area. All Senior Son's instructor seemed to do was take him round and round the test route, which might get him to pass his test, but didn't teach him to drive. So everywhere the lad wanted to go, I let him drive. All weather, sun, rain or fog. Whether it was up the Dales, or into Darlington, across to Middlesbrough or down to Northallerton. These were the places he'd be driving on his own, I reasoned, so it made sense for him to familiarise with them and their hazards. It was a great theory.

And what happened?

Three hours after passing his test he put the car through a hedge on the road to Richmond - the route he must have driven more times than any other. Ho hum.

Because if teaching them to drive is bad, then once they've passed their test it's worse. Because then they're on their own.

You've fed them the healthiest foods, cuddled them, made sure they've had their jabs, sterilised their teething ring, trailed back and forth to clinics and doctors and dentists and hospitals, for what? So they can go out on our overcrowded roads at the wheel of a lethal weapon. I don't know why we do it, I really don't.

Except that if they weren't driving, they'd only be a passenger in someone else's car and you can't nag the other drivers. Senior Son's worst accident was when he was a passenger. So, he says, he's safer driving than not. Maybe.

But once they've passed their test - and if they have easy access to a car - you realise quite how lazy they are.

At first Senior Son said he wasn't going to use the car to drive to school because it was a waste of petrol when there was a perfectly good bus.

Then he realised, because sixth form didn't demand full time attendance - he could have an extra hour in bed on days with no first lesson. After a few weeks, he had got this down to a fine art, so he could be out of bed at 9.45am, in the shower, dressed, in the car and at school for 10am.

I would watch him, fleeing through the door with an apple in one hand, car keys in the other and think, "Is this why I spent all that money on lessons, risked my nerves, my life, his life on the region's roads?"

But it now - touch wood, cross fingers - four years since his last accident.

Let's hope that all our boys have that other L too - for LUCK.