We collect you from wherever you asked. Your instructor drives to a quiet estate — usually behind Meole Brace or out towards Bicton — talking through what the pedals do on the way, then swaps seats with you at the kerb. You will do the cockpit drill, move off, stop, and do it again perhaps twenty times. Most people are driving under their own control inside the first twenty minutes and are astonished by that. Nothing is timed, nothing is assessed, and if you stall eleven times nobody will mention it. At the end you get a page in a record book saying what you covered and what comes next, and you keep the book.

An automatic is genuinely easier: no clutch, no gears, no stalling at the worst roundabout in town. People typically get through in about a quarter fewer hours, so at our rates that is £400 or so saved. The catch is the licence. Pass in an automatic and you may only ever drive an automatic; pass in a manual and you may drive both. If you are seventeen and there is any chance of a van, a tractor, a hire car abroad or a friend’s older car in the next decade, take the manual and spend the four hundred pounds. If you are fifty-eight, driving your own automatic for the next twenty years, that argument is worth nothing and you should take the easy road with our blessing.

Every hour you drive with a parent, a partner or a friend is an hour you are not paying us for, and the DVSA figures are blunt about it: learners who practise privately need roughly twenty fewer paid hours. Your supervisor must be over twenty-one and have held a full licence for three years, and the car needs L-plates and the right insurance, which is cheaper than most people assume. We will tell you at the end of every lesson exactly what is safe to practise before the next one and what to leave alone — and please do leave the roundabouts alone until we say otherwise, because unlearning a bad habit costs more than learning the thing did.