Pilcrow

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I’m not sure that I can claim to have taken my place in the human alphabet, even as its honorary twenty-seventh letter. I’m more like a specialised piece of punctuation, a cedilla, umlaut or pilcrow, hard to track down on the keyboard of a computer or typewriter. Pilcrow is the prettiest of the bunch, assessed purely as a word. And at least it stands on its own. It doesn’t perch or dangle. Pilcrow it is.

The spring I learned to drive, the cherry tree in front of our house in Bourne End flowered as never before. It was 1968. Driving meant a lot to me as an idea. I felt that mastery of a car was a big step on the way to mastery of a life. I had my grandmother to thank for the car, a red Mini, licence plate OHM 962F, which cost £670 that year (new). I had Dad to thank for the gruelling lessons. I got started with the British School of Motoring, but Dad finished me off. He could be rather a remote figure, but I had nothing to complain about on that score while he was my driving instructor. He was relentless.

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