ALL I have in common with MP Anne Widdecombe, apart from a tendency to hold forth hysterically with eyes rolling on any topic, is ownership of a Ford Focus.

Anne at the wheel of a car conjures a picture of eager anticipation and unhurried progress, though she was once nicked for speeding on the Sidcup by-pass. While decelerating, it must be said.

Motoring in New England a few years ago convinced me that no driver under any circumstance needs to travel faster than 50mph - it's safer and it obviates the need for overtaking.

Of course, it's wishfully imaginative to believe that 'in our day', as the over-fifties are always describing their early adulthood, everyone chugged along with the elegance of a post-chaise. Speed, like everything else, is relative.

It was relatively slow when I was learning to drive as a teenager under my father's instruction. A trained motor mechanic, he protected his territory, even regarding my one fleeting interest in motor-racing as a rash attempt to overtake him, figuratively speaking, on the inside.

He was right to keep me at bay, as I had a habit on one of our many test routes of changing into top gear when starting to climb a hill.

He soon handed me over to a mate of his who had done some professional instruction but who insisted on chain-smoking in the front passenger seat. I was soon driving under the influence of carbon monoxide, turning right when I had signalled left.

It was not done to pass your test first time and, as I recall, few people did. My examiner was almost seven feet tall, wore a dirty gaberdine mackintosh and was a direct descendant of Vlad the Impaler. Knowing that I had failed before we'd set out from the test centre in Pillgwenlly, I stalled the vehicle.

Young adults in the early 1960s, unlike today's specimens, hardly ever became car owners immediately on receiving their full driving licence.

They didn't have the money. In this, they resembled their parents.

Many of the people who had experience of my first eccentric vehicles went on to higher things in journalism, possibly through a need to own something more reliable than a Volkswagen Beetle consisting of two crashed vehicles welded together or an Austin 7 with a hole in the floor as big as a paella pan.

Once embarked on the foolhardy path of owning new or nearly-new cars, there was no way out, but we did invoke our post-war austerity by making sure all the inside space was occupied.

Six of us forced ourselves and our luggage into a Morris 1000 (MUM 217F, wherever you are) for a 12-hour trip to Cornwall, and we almost rang the Guinness Book of Records after doing something similar on a holiday trip to Lymington in a Mini.

MG is planning to revive its Wolseley marque, though presumably not the Wolseley 12, whose air of gentlemanly refinement, it is said, was advertising-speak for sluggish performance.

And to think I once aspired to owning the Wolseley equivalent of a Riley Elf. My father was right: I never knew anything useful about cars, except how to use the hole in my Austin 7 as a primitive form of air-conditioning.