DRIVING home at 5.30am from the all-night stint at the election count last week I had to drop someone off in the very depths of the country.

No problem with that, you might think, and on that fresh and beautiful early morning there wasn't.

For the first time in many a year I actually enjoyed driving down narrow country lanes because I knew that I was unlikely to meet anything bigger on the road than a tom cat returning home after a night on the tiles.

Knowing my luck, I suppose, it could have been a very large tom cat with an attitude problem sitting in the middle of the road refusing to move until I reversed back into a tiny space. But in the event I didn't even see so much as a bolshie rabbit, apart from a few baby bunnies hopping into the hedgerows.

It was a glorious morning, the banks were bright with flowers and birds were singing. Apart from me, and a white van I met at a crossroads (there's always a white van wherever you go at whatever time of the day and it's always driven by someone who is late for an appointment) there was not a single soul out and about.

Now in case any of you think I'm writing a nature column by mistake I should explain that I normally don't drive blithely down country lanes; I avoid them whenever possible.

It's because of reversing, you see. I'm not good at it, especially in country lanes. And if you live in Cornwall avoiding country lanes is not easy. It's a bit like living in Holland and being allergic to to tulips.

It's got to the point that I have to plan my working life around a route map. If good friends move to a rural location I have to reluctantly tell them they are not likely to be seeing much of me in future. Not unless they excavate at least four new passing places on their impossibly narrow approach road.

I'm beginning to think it's becoming a bit of a phobia. I've even had dreams of driving down a nice open road which gradually gets narrower and narrower, with green dripping walls on either side until it becomes only wide enough for one car. It's at that point I wake up screaming, because I know that round the corner I'm going to meet a black combine harvester and I don't want to see who's driving it.

Ah, you're thinking. How did this woman pass her test?

Well, I was lucky. I did have to reverse round a corner but it was a wide corner, the examiner was a nice relaxing sort of man, and the road was deserted. In a previous test I had to reverse uphill into a narrow road to stop just in front of a parked car. I thought I was doing fine until a man came out of his house, stood in front of what was obviously his car and started to make gestures urging me to go back a bit. I suppose he was being kind, so I felt guilty about wanting to jump out of the car and stamp on his feet. He put me off so much that I stalled and then selected forward gear by mistake. The rest is history.

I was also fortunate that it was after I passed my test that they brought in the new torture of reversing into a kerbside space. If I had had to do that I would be driving a Reliant Robin by now; not good street cred for a newspaper editor.

Ah, you will also be saying if you are male, it's the same story with lots of women.

They can't reverse.

I have to admit this is fairly true. A lot of women can't. And it's very odd because most men can. My son can reverse a car into the tiniest parking space available. One I couldn't get in if my life depended on it.

A friend of mine says it's because men are good at doing things backwards anyway. 'Look at the way they wash up', she says. 'They chuck all the greasy things in first, then the pans, then they do the plates.' I could add, of course, that they also usually pile everything up on the sink in such a way that if you move one tiny teaspoon the entire lot crashes back into the sink. I call it 'pick a stick' washing up.

I have done a quick check around friends and colleagues and most of them have a reversing horror story and most of them involve the same things I have horror stories about. Tractors, muck spreading machines, grass in the middle of the road, herds of cows, beaten up four by fours driven by one man and his sheepdog, and school buses. Always school buses.

If you want the ultimate in embarrassment you only need to take one narrow lane, one school bus with male driver and at least a dozen primary school children and put them together with a person who would rather not reverse three quarters of a mile down a lane with Cornish bank hedges on either side with an interested and mainly giggly audience and you have the ideal ingredients to give someone a red face which will last a week.

I keep telling myself it's stupid to be nervous in narrow lanes (and even more stupid to have to do a 43 mile detour to avoid them, taking long cuts instead of short ones).

I tell myself how silly it is when I can drive forward through the narrowest places and perform perfectly adequate three point turns anywhere.

I'm not scared of speed or traffic. I've even driven a Challenger tank for goodness sake, although I suppose this was cheating a bit. Firstly it was on a tank range, secondly in order to reverse you need someone up above you giving you directions through headphones because you can't possibly see behind you anyway and thirdly if there is anything in the way you can go right over it without a care in the world. Actually that's probably what is needed in those lanes. Driving a tank one would only have to catch the eye of the person coming towards you and detect a very slight reluctance to reverse back to the nearest passing place (which is usually nearer you than them) and you could push the tank into one of its numerous forward gears and go right over the top.

Fantasy of course. I'm going to have to get a grip and tell myself at my age it's absolutely ridiculous that I can only visit people on main roads and have to plan my social life round ordnance survey maps.

I haven't even yet touched upon reverse parking between two cars in a street which is apparently totally deserted and yet the instant you drop the gear into reverse a group of onlookers appears like rent-a-crowd and all with fixed supercilious grins on their absolutely certainly male faces and you end up with your car pointing halfway across the road six feet from the kerb.

Actually, come to think of it, women being unable to reverse give men such joy that perhaps we should leave things as they are. Don't want to give them something else to grin about for do we?

I'm off now, it's quite safe to leave, the car park's sure to be empty.