I LAUGHED heartily at the recent results of one of those ubiquitous surveys, one which announced that drivers are most distracted by the presence of their other half.

This is not news in our house, where my husband and I have battled in the car for the duration of our relationship. He’s usually driving and I am navigating/nagging, and yes, there are frequently fireworks.

It doesn’t help that we seem to attract driving-related disaster. Whilst returning from a week’s holiday recently, we pulled into M25 services when the three year-old announced that she needed to visit the facilities.

It was immediately clear that this was not a good idea, when it took 20 minutes to just enter the site due to the traffic.

As it was a Friday afternoon, I’d wanted to take our chances and clear the worst part of our journey before rush hour hit, but the husband thought different.

We were then caught in one of the worst pressure cooker car park scenarios I have ever been in, where the nasty side of human nature was exposed as hundreds of cars tried to escape from the jam via one tiny one-lane exit.

Rather than navigating the disaster and processing what he could see – that the position we were in was at the end of the route and every other person dodging the queue was filtering in in front of us, ensuring we were going nowhere - he remained where we were.

That orbital nightmare road has been the scene of quite a few of our motoring meltdowns. 

I am a bad traveller, and have suffered from extreme car sickness all my life (which doesn’t affect me when I am the one driving). This means I do not want to be in there for any longer than necessary and causes quite a bit of impatience with non-nippy navigation.

When he therefore fails, yes, in my humble opinion, to take the most effective route/option, I add my unwelcome suggestions or eventually come to the boil.

His past doesn’t help him either; the elephant in me can’t forget the time when he almost pulled out on a roundabout having failed to notice a motorcyclist, when he was fined for not wearing his seatbelt and when he went completely the wrong way on the M25, adding hours to our journey.

I hate to reinforce the stereotype, but he has no sense of direction. Yes, he’s English, and has lived in the south all his life, but I know the local roads much better, something he might, when forced, admit himself.

On a recent expedition, he even missed the exit right before our house. This time, at least, I managed to chuckle.