I come from a line of terrible drivers. When I was small, my mother wrote a weekly column in our local paper, The Northern Echo. It embraced anything she was thinking about that week, from the Russians sending a dog into space, to what my brother and I had been up to (I can remember pleading with her, “Pleeeaasee don’t write about us”, a sentiment with which I feel some of my new neighbours might sympathise).

One week she wrote about how she just couldn’t imagine being able to drive, even though she observed around her that perfectly ordinary people managed to parallel park and take the second exit from the roundabout without screaming in existential terror.

The next week, she received a letter from the local driving school saying if she would only put her faith in them, they were sure they could teach her to drive. They would like to offer her free lessons until she passed her test. It’s entirely possible that sending Laika, the Moscow street dog, into orbit was a less complex endeavour. It took two years  and more than a hundred lessons.

When she finally passed, she bought a blue Hillman Imp from a young priest at the local seminary. It came with a bottle of holy water in the shape of the Madonna on the dashboard and a rosary hanging from the mirror, for which we were all extremely grateful.

While I might not admire French driving, I do quite enjoy their general indifference to cars, or at least to those flashy status-symbols that so often seem to play the role of personality substitute for their owners.

My English friend Claudia, who’s lived in a village to the north of us for many years, describes her first encounter with French car culture. “When we arrived, I had an old red Mercedes and she was pristine. I parked it at Clermont-l’Hérault market and came back to find someone had sheared it all down one side and taken the wing mirror off. When our builder arrived, he took one look at it and said, with no surprise at all: ‘Meh, Languedoc special, fits right in now.’”

This feeling doesn’t just persist with country people. My London friend Tom’s family have a flat in Paris. “I went to a party one evening and my dad asked me to walk this very BCBG (bon chic bon genre, the French version of Sloane Rangers) lady to her car. It was a beaten up wreck of a Peugeot 205. And her ex owned a very smart department store right in the middle of Paris.” He goes on to describe an episode of Top Gear about French cars he’d enjoyed: “It stated that four per cent of French people said they washed their car by hand. They would think you were mad spending a Sunday morning doing it. To the French, the paintwork is the wrapping it comes in; scratches, dents, on a brand new car – they don’t care.”

In many parts of France, this is probably just as well because of the extreme narrowness of the roads in some villages and towns. Many years ago, we rented a house in Agde. This was before the advent of satnav, and when we arrived at the end of our 620-mile drive, all we had to help us locate the house was the owner’s hastily hand-drawn map. It was not to scale, or accurate. Very quickly, we were lost in the winding 17th-century streets.

A young girl sitting on the kerb painting her toenails gave us one of those withering teenager looks and simply curled up her toes, just enough to let us drive past. It was one of the most magnificent acts of defiance I have ever seen.

Eventually, we emerged into a small square which would have been an enormous relief, had it not been filled with tables and chairs from the corner café. Mercifully, the café-goers seemed not at all perturbed. They simply got up and rearranged the furniture to clear our route. I suspect it was not the first time that had happened.

So this is to say, on reflection, I won’t be dusting off my licence and driving here any time soon. Instead, I think I might buy a bike, something that I was also far too chicken to own in London. I am very easily distracted and cycling through Hackney is not for those without razor-sharp attention and considerable gifts for acceleration. I have neither of those.

But everyone seems to cycle here, and the terrain is pleasingly flat. There’s a woman I see about the village on a large tricycle with a basket on the back big enough for a week’s shopping and a dog or two. I covet it. At last, something I can drive without recourse to holy water or rosary. So modern.