There is an urban myth that we learn to drive only after we have passed our driving test.

The truth is that most of us never do learn.

I have been driving for over thirty years without realising that I couldn't drive until last year when I went to Italy to spend a fortnight driving around the Sicily soaking up the atmosphere and spending time with my god daughter.

We met in the capital, Palermo where I was taken straight to the car hire office by the docks.

We were faced with a showroom filled exclusively with Italian cars and my gaze was almost immediately captured by a fine silver Alfa Romeo.

I could feel my god daughter tugging at my sleeve saying something that sounded like Fiat but it was really too late and the deed was done.

We left the showroom heading for the street and the nightmare began.

It was a one way street for two lanes of traffic that not only had three lanes of cars, there were also two lanes of motor bikes flying about between the cars.

I was suddenly feeling very vulnerable in my large Alfa that felt like a huge silver island in a sea buzzing with little red fiats and Moto's.

The road was packed and I could see no possibility of forcing the Alfa into the tiny gaps that occasionally presented themselves.

I was seriously considering spending the next two weeks sitting outside the hire shop, staring at the traffic.

My god daughter, who had been watching my expression of mounting despair, took charge.

She told me to drive out, I said no, there was too much traffic. She said that when the other road users knew that I wanted to come out they would make room for me.

Faced with the alternative of two weeks in the same spot I let out the clutch and began to edge forward into the melee.

Slowly we moved forward and inexorably the traffic closed behind us cutting off any thought of retreat.

Once in the stream it was simply a matter of keeping up with the flow and hoping that we wanted to keep going straight ahead.

I could feel the rising panic but I was made of sterner stuff, after all it was only a hire car, what was the worst that could happen?

We started to edge over to turn right and the same thing started to happen.

The traffic gently parted for us then simply joined up behind as we gently edged our way across the stream until we arrived at our turning.

I was too grateful to have arrived in one piece to think about why we had escaped unscathed from the traffic and following more instructions from my god daughter, continued the same performance through gritted teeth until we were out of the city onto the relatively empty autostrada.

The relief lasted until we decided to pull over for lunch. The nightmare began again except that this time we were in the hills and the village where we decided to stop had a very narrow main street that everybody had decided to try to get through at the same time.

For the next two days every time we approached a built up area there was the same quickening of the pulse the inevitable perspiration and the tightening of the throat that suggested panic was not to far away.

The culmination was in a place called Cefalu. A beautiful old port where we decided to look for a hotel, dump the car and indulge in a seafood frenzy with a bottle of the delightfully fresh pink Sicilian wine.

We descended the hill towards the harbour. The lower we got the narrower became the street until we discovered why Italian cars have retractable wing mirrors when we reached the old town.

We couldn