punto int I last wrote about cars a little over a year ago, noting at the time the fact that as I had no need to own a car, my personal parking space was more than a little superfluous. No longer, I now berth my very own car there.

In truth this is more than a little fraudulent, as for the second time in my adult life I have been “gifted” an end of life vehicle that my parents were about to trade in and found it was probably more worthwhile to give it a proper home instead. Never one to turn down an act of familial generosity, I thus am the proud keeper (as the law would have it) of a ten year old white Fiat Punto.

Can I confess now what a weird feeling it all is?

It is literally almost 15 years since I last owned a car, August 1995 being the final burial of the similarly donated Talbot Alpine which had served me so well during my student years. Whilst I’ve driven at regularly spaced intervals since then, be it either driving the officially branded vehicle of whatever radio station I was working at or borrowing one or the other of my parents’ cars whilst at home for a Christmas break, this will mark the first time in a decade and a half I’ve been a regular behind the wheel of a vehicle I have been responsible for maintaining.

You may not appreciate this if you have been motoring for all this time, but whilst I have been “away” it seems that driving has changed beyond all recognition. This isn’t so much down to the price of fuel or the numbers of vehicles on the road, more the numerous ways in which it is possible to fall foul of regulations and which require far more attention to detail than I was ever used to previously. I used to laugh at the number of people who would phone up the radio station and bang on about the “war on motorists” or treat the regular guests who were experts on parking ticket and speeding camera loopholes like they were Gods, but clearly the more wedded you are to your car and its attendant benefits the more you come to resent the obstacles that stand in your way of appreciating it properly.

Back when I was last a regular driver there were hardly any speed cameras or mandatory bus lanes at all. Now it seems you spend half your journey in a state of paranoia about falling foul of the law. Do people really need gadgets on their dashboard to ping every time there is a camera site approaching? Having driven for a short while the other day with a borrowed sat nav on the dashboard chirping away like there is no tomorrow I have to confess to seeing the point. Driving in South London it was clear that whilst the white stripy lines on the road were indeed placed at points where accidents were clearly possible, at times it seemed almost illogical that I was crawling along at some arbitrarily defined lower limit when at the time the journey took place the road and traffic conditions clearly did not merit the same level of caution. Indeed given that I now had half my attention focused on the speedometer and consequently rather less on the road in front, was my driving really any safer as a result of driving under the fear of getting a penalty notice in the post?

Granted London is a special case and with the sheer number of people around and the volumes of traffic involved, it is entirely possible that road interdictions proliferate here to a far greater extent than they do in the rest of the country. Nonetheless any driver reading this will sympathise with the added complication of not only driving to avoid hitting pedestrians or other vehicles but also of maintaining a strict lane discipline for fear of straying even momentarily into a bus lane and being subjected to the three figure fines that the roadside warnings suggest will be the consequence of doing so.

You cannot help but compare this to the way people behave in other countries. I’ve spent a fair amount of time being driven around the streets of Kiev when visiting the in-laws, a city and a culture where road sense seems to be based on instinct rather than a paperback book of laws. Yes there are roads with lane markings and junctions, but these often seem to be based on little more than best efforts, an aspiration when traffic volumes mean people have to wait their turn. The rest of the time it is pretty much as you like, people drifting down multi lane highways in groups of two or three abreast, the occasional thump on the horn being all it needs to bring any errant steering into line. Parking there appears at times to be an enormously liberated pastime. Yes there are properly organised parking areas, complete with ticket issuing attendants, but in other places and on side streets it can often be a cheerful free for all with cars tucked into verge and on kerbs wherever a space may afford itself. Maybe this is all regulated in some way, but to the casual visitor it all seems very relaxed and egalitarian. Everyone with a car needs to park it up, and if a person with a car has put it there and is not blocking anything then it is fair enough, everyone else will work around it.

That is another joy of driving again in Britain, dealing with the perils of parking. On Thursday evening as a way of practising driving into central London when it was relatively quiet, I drove the car into work so I could reap the benefit of jumping into my vehicle at 1am when the show finished and not have to stand in reception in fear that the pre-booked taxi was going to take 20 minutes to show up. Parking outside the office in the evening is normally a doddle, our quiet south bank street relatively free from traffic at that time of day. Not so this week as I had somehow timed my trip to coincide with a five a side tournament taking place on the plastic pitches across the road. Thus the area was rammed and I had to initially tour the block to find a spare space. Mindful of the number of times I had chuckled to myself as the enthusiastic parking attendants of Southwark council towed another hapless vehicle away, I triple checked the nearby signs to make sure the car was safe there at least for a few moments.

It was whilst making the final parking arrangements for the evening though that I discovered the most important change in motoring in the decade and a half that I had been away. Big expensive cars have become far more complicated than ever before.

I discovered this on Thursday evening when I asked the security guard for the gates of the private car park at the office to be opened so I could tuck my car inside rather than leave it to be ticketed or uprooted. In return for this favour he enlisted my help to rearrange the existing vehicles inside the cramped courtyard so better maximise the use of space, proffering me a handful of keys that their owners had deposited with the front desk as is the rule.

This was all relatively easy, except when it came to the final task of shifting Alan Brazil’s car, a vast and gleaming BMW model that positively glowed with top of the range sheen. After negotiating which button to press on the remote control for the door lock, I climbed inside and made to start it up, grimacing slightly at the fact that I needed to teach myself on the fly how to activate the automatic gearbox.

I extracted what seemed to be the ignition key from its pouch and searched for the lock. Only there wasn’t one. Nothing that looked as if it was a spot where you inserted and turned something made of stainless steel – the time honoured way of starting even the most exciting of cars in my experience. Then on the dashboard I saw a button – “IGNITION ON/OFF” – which I pressed. Lights, radio and air conditioning all sprang into life. Despite begging it otherwise, the engine did not.

To my shame then I had to call upstairs to other colleagues in the office who had in the past been on car moving duties.

“How on earth do you start Brazil’s car then?” was my plaintive cry.

Various discussions took place until one of them remembered:

“Hold down the brake pedal whilst pressing the button, that should work.”

I was instantly transported back to the days of my little 50cc scooter with its automatic ignition which too required an application of the back brake whilst pressing the button. Amused that an expensive executive model used the same mode of operation as one of the cheapest vehicles on the road, I pressed the button and the engine coughed into life. Wrestling with the gear stick to work out how to take the car out of “park” mode, a computer screen flashed into life with detailed instructions on what button to press. Shifting the car into reverse, I was further surprised by a fresh display showing how far the onboard proximity sensors believed I was from any nearby obstacles.

At this I was at once amused and insulted. After all part of the art of driving is surely the ability to manoeuvre your car without any kind of remote assistance. Whilst a student I prided myself on my ability to turn and park on a 50 pence piece using little more than my wing mirrors, a necessary skill if you wanted to squeeze in to a perimeter parking space on the university campus. Yet here I was in a vehicle that was presumably owned and driven by only the most experienced of drivers, surrounded by all manner of gadgets that were designed to remove what remaining pieces of skill were required to park. Small wonder that the BMW was parked at an angle across the courtyard and I was the one being required to make the final adjustments to get everything to fit neatly. I ignore the whines from the computers and edged the car up against the metal fences. Its owner wasn’t needing it until morning, and I wanted to fit my car in behind it for the next few hours.

Clearly I do have some catching up to do. In fifteen years motoring has changed to mean that there are pitfalls aplenty for the average motorist to fall into, the chances of falling foul of speed cameras, bus lanes and even congestion charges an order of magnitude higher than they once were. Add to that the fact that people are now driving around in cars that appear to do everything but steer for you automatically and I wonder if I am one of a dying breed of old school drivers who still knows how to use a choke knob.

Oh yes, and I do have a sat nav – the temptation to “do an Uncle Bryn” and thank the woman inside for each instruction appears to be overwhelming. I’m tempted to switch the voice to Russian and start driving like I am in Kiev. That will show a few people.