Tiger and me - driving into trouble

This week I've found myself in a position I never imagined I could ever be in. I know exactly how Tiger Woods feels.

I know exactly how Tiger Woods feels.

Tiger is a world-class athlete, a multimillionaire and a global role model. I once nearly got into the Robert Gordon's College hockey 5th eleven. But this week Tiger and I are united in a bond more intimate than anything that wealth, culture, or even shared sporting glory, can fashion.

We have both been outed as spectacular failures in the area where modern husbands are increasingly required to perform flawlessly. Neither of us can reverse for toffee.

For most people, the news that Tiger had crashed into a fire hydrant when coming out of his drive in the early hours of the morning would be suspicious. If they then heard that, immediately after, he had hit a tree so hard that the airbags blew up, then most people would presume that the global superstar had probably been hitting the rocket fuel a bit too hard earlier in the evening.

But not me.

Nothing in my life is as fraught, complicated and liable to end in expensive disaster as "easing" my Skoda into a car park slot or out of a suburban driveway. If you have seen hippos mating you will have some idea of how hard I find getting my vehicle berthed elegantly.

Which is why I sympathise with Tiger. For those of us who are parking-dyspraxic, every day brings new moments of tooth-grinding horror.

I have lost count of the number of walls, pillars, gateways and pediments I have scythed by, hit or ground to dust. So much so that my nearside door is more deeply scored than a Vancouver ice rink after an Olympic hockey final, and it now offers about as much robust armoured protection as a French tank division in May 1940.

Even with my blithe insouciance towards the damage I inflict on my vehicle, I can still get myself into a spot so tight there's no escape.

I once jammed my car so securely against a reinforced concrete strut in a multistorey car park in Camberley that I had to call my wife, who was working in London at the time, to come down to Surrey to move it, otherwise I would have been trapped in the parking space for the night, leaving the children marooned in a friend's home without hope of rescue. I think that any court would have forgiven her if she'd taken a nine iron to me after that. . .

For any man, admitting that you can't park is like confessing to a love of flower arranging, or revealing that your favourite book is Noel Streatfeild's Ballet Shoes. It's not such damning proof of effeminacy that it would convince a court beyond any reasonable doubt that you were a total and irredeemable wuss but it comes pretty close. For a global superstar such as Tiger the stigma of being found to be, like me, a truly appalling driver could be career-ending. Far better to be thought of as a bit of a lad who's in trouble with 'er indoors over a tabloid tale than be outed as a guy who's never managed to master reverse parallel parking. But don't worry, Tiger, I understand.

Graphic account

There are few books I've picked up this year with a greater sense of trepidation than Joe Sacco's Footnotes in Gaza. It's marketed as a documentary account of two underdocumented episodes from Middle Eastern history. Told through the medium of a comic strip.

My initial reaction was that comic strips were about as handy a way of explaining Middle Eastern history as mime was of interpreting Wagner. Don't cartoons, by their very nature, tend to trivialise or caricature? But the humanity, and personal honesty, of Sacco's work soon quelled any doubts in my mind. He uses his superlative skills as a draughtsman to imbue an oral history with the immediacy of cinema, while allowing the reader time to reflect and absorb an immensely moving chronicle of suffering.

I do not know if Sacco's account of history is entirely accurate, and he admits he doesn't either, but his empathy with those who have suffered is both noble and affecting. And his work underlined the extent in my mind to which both Israelis and Palestinians are victims of history and, also, those Arab neighbours who have never felt comfortable with either people becoming a nation.

Churchill's spirit lives on

It's the 135th anniversary of Winston Churchill's birth today. If you're in any doubt that he was the greatest Englishman who ever lived do take some time this Christmas to read either Andrew Roberts's superlative narrative history The Storm of War, or Max Hastings's wonderful new biography Finest Years. You'll appreciate that it was Churchill's moral courage that saved not just this country, but the Western world, in 1940. His declaration to the Cabinet that it was their duty to fight, come what may, until they fell, choking on their own blood, gave the country what it needed most in its hour of darkness -- pure, bloody-minded bulldog resolution.

Churchill's own life also proved the truth of one of his, and my, favourite principles. Success, he once proclaimed, was a matter of going from failure to failure without losing enthusiasm. Look at my car door and you'll see that that spirit lives on.