Before anybody gets over-excited, I'm not referring with this column's title to the cutely addictive crooner of lilting pop songs; nor is it a reference to the planet in Doctor Who amusingly (not to mention infamously) mispelt as (look away now Mum) Dildo in Adrian Rigelsford's (again, I'm not to mention infamously) 1993 book on the history of Doctor Who.

No, rather less excitingly than either of the above possibilities, the DIDO to which I refer is in fact Drive In Drive Out (proving my credentials as a Doctor Who fan and ergo a lover of acronyms). Those puzzling over possible affiliations to MacDonalds (which would almost certainly result in Lissa asking me to clear my desk by lunchtime) and its dubiously-spelt "Drive Thru" system are barking up quite the wrong tree. Think car parks, which might as it were set you barking in the right direction, and in particular those lovely spaces that you can drive into (DI) and also drive out of (DO...er, DOO?) without, getting finally to the point, without having to reverse.

Ah, now we get to the heart of the matter. A lot of car-parks, from the humbly tiny one behind our local supermarket (regularly policed by a short stocky guy who clearly would be on your case the instant you went over the permitted hour-and-a-quarter) to very large and swanky multi-storey car parks, have spaces that extend outwards from the walls. In other words, you either have to carefully reverse in on arrival, so as to be able to subsequently drive straight out on departure; or you can drive straight in to your space (quite possibly the better policy, for fear of some other driver craftily sneaking in there in the time it takes you to go past and switch into reverse gear) but in so doing only postpone, rather than avoid, the inevitable reversing manoeuvre (totally irrelevant, but you might be amused to know that my first attempt to spell that read "maneouveour").

It's not that I can't reverse (he typed, fending off Mrs Curnow who seems to think I shouldn't put such lies on the Internet) but I openly admit that I just plain don't like to. I did of course learn the trick when I was a learner driver, but of course it tended to be more around corners, or between two white lines, and most significantly in places where my instructor had ensured there weren't (m)any other vehicles around. More often than not, I seem to find that free car park spaces always end up being between two other cars, and at least driving forward into the space makes it that bit easier to miss them. Reversing involves all that fiddling about with mirrors and the like. It also involves judging distances, which I just don't seem able to do - I can't tell how tall people are by looking at them (I'd be useless if I had to give the police a description of anybody) and similarly I can't with any particular accuracy work out (from the driving seat) how near my boot/wing-mirror/etc is to the cars behind/to the left/to the right of me.

Mind you, it would be wrong of me to give the impression that I love driving, except for reversing. Far from it - as a useful method of getting from A to B, driving scores over walking only in terms of speed, and if there were enough buses going to the right places at the right time, or even better, if Dr Beeching had been less concerned about BR's Balance Sheet, I would readily switch to public transport. (Again a little irrelevant, but I saw a photograph today of our local viaduct in the 1960s, with a genuine train going across it, and it did make me pine for the age of steam.) I know that many people love the whole driving experience (our own Ant Cox being just one of these incomprehensible people) but I'm afraid I just don't share the joy.

I suppose that part of my aversion to driving comes down to ignorance. I know, in an abstract theoretical sense, what's under the bonnet, and thanks to Dad telling me (well how else would I know?) I am aware that you need to top up the water every so often, and also check the level of the... oh, you know, that dark sticky stuff... But other than that I don't have any real understanding of how it all fits together, far less how it all actually works. I know that in there somewhere are spark plugs and carburettors, and an engine obviously. Because of the old Ronnie Corbett gag about the horse who knows about cars, I know there's something in the mix called "a fanbelt" and, because when I was a child the purple car we had broke down on the motorway because of it, I know that one bit is called "the alternator". But what the belt is connected to, or what the alternator is alternating with, or what exactly carburretting does, I couldn't tell you.

As a result of this lack of hands-on knowledge, I tend to find myself driving with part of my mind worrying over whether it's all going to suddenly break down. To be fair, this fear has been accentuated with our most recent car (a Vauxhall Cavalier, to anybody interested - although if you operate at the same level as me, "a white one" is probably as much detail as is good for you). When we first got it, it really did break down several times - once we had to be towed home 35 miles; another time, somehow even more embarrassing, we had to be towed home just 3 miles from just outside the local supermarket. Consequently, that sense that at any moment something may go wrong, is always with me. And my superstitious ignorance on all matters mechanical can perhaps best be demonstrated by the fact that last time I topped up the oil, the car broke down within twenty-four hours, juddering and jumping and necessitating another trip to the garage... and so of course I am now wary about topping up the oil again for fear that I am somehow causing the breakdown with the amateur way I do it.

Some people of course are quite the opposite, and absolutely love to get in there, tweaking and tinkering. One of our neighbours is like that, and his car is forever being worked on at the weekend. There's clearly nothing wrong with it, he's just keeping it in as good a condition as he can, even to the point of overkill - although the recent addition of cowprint seat covers suggests that perhaps he may have begun to lose it. My paternal Grandpa was the same. I think I'm right in saying that he once totally confused somebody by opining that you never really knew a car properly until you'd taken it abroad. "Taken it abroad" in this sense (possibly OED, more likely uniquely Cornish) meaning "had a good look and a work over under the bonnet", but doubtless the other party to the conversation had visions of my Grandparents gaily swanning over to Calais just to try out their Triumph Dolomite.

Of course, this lack of sound engineering application isn't something I've acquired just since learning to drive. Far from it in fact, my woeful ignorance has been clearly on display long before that. Even as a child I can remember reasoning that if one pedal makes the car go faster, and another makes it go slower, then the mysterious third pedal must be the one you press to make it keep at the same speed. When I chuckle at Mr Burns from The Simpsons deciding to chauffeur himself with the comment that "the manual will clearly indicate which pedal is the velocitator and which the deceleratrix" it's with a rare sense of kinship for the aged old Machiavelli of Springfield.

Either just before or just after my parents had managed to convince me that I ought to learn to drive, I remember them (Mum in particular, which seems a little like the blind leading the blind) trying to explain the concept of "gears" to me. It didn't bode well, when Mum explained that you would go into first gear to go down the driveway and then slip into second as you get onto the road proper. I asked whether if we didn't have a driveway you'd just start from second gear... Dad tried a different tack, which was explaining to me the mechanical and technical actions of the gear, and what changing the gear physically does to the internal workings of the car. I think, dear reader, you can probably imagine how ill-fated that attempt was...

To be honest, when learning to drive it was very easy indeed to decide when to change gear - whenever I saw my driving instructor looking at me out of the corner of my eye, I knew he was wondering when I was going to change, and so I would change. Since then (because of course now I've passed my test my old, brave, instructor doesn't very often sit in the passenger seat next to me) I have to just do the best I can. Sometimes the mechanical beast makes such a noise that even a novice like me knows to change gear; sometimes the car is even more proactive in the decision-making process and judders about like a Kangaroo on the San Andreas fault. And to be honest even now I sometimes change gear, and then find myself wondering why.

And to be fair, I don't think this gear business makes all that much sense anyway. Even before I was old enough to learn to drive, my parents got a new Skoda which had, for the first time as far as my parents were concerned, a fifth gear. My Mum rather endearingly referred to it as the hyperdrive; and although Dad never had any trouble adapting to it (or possibly, being a man, never admitted to having any trouble) Mum would only ever keep it for special occasions, and so generally never got out of fourth gear except in emergencies. And to my mind, if a car can suddenly come along that has a whole extra gear, how critically important, how set-in-stone vital, can they be?

Even more compelling, I once had a friend with a seventeen-gear bike. Seventeen! That's four-and-a-bit cars' worth, or alternatively three-and-a-bit if we're measuring in cars equipped with hyperspace capability. How can a bike possibly be more complicated than a car for goodness' sake? If I'd had such a bike I'd have spent most of my time parked at the kerbside dithering over which gear to use. Really, how much difference can there be between, say, numbers 7 and 8, or 12 and 13?

Since passing my driving test (and can I just say that I did it first time - and even my instructor was surprised) I haven't always had a car, only intermittently. The first was a Ford Fiesta/A Purple Car for a couple of years to 1995; then a Fiat Regatta/A Light Blue Car during 1997/98; and then the current Vauxhall Cavalier (White, as we have already established) since 2003. When I bought the Fiesta, a chap at work made the observation that I'd be poor forever, and I do wonder sometimes where the sense is in paying well over a hundred pounds a year to tax the car, over three hundred to insure it, at least the cost of the test to MOT it (and usually more, since there always seems to be something that needs doing first), and then the costs of actually keeping it fed with that liquid stuff that smells... It seems rather extravagant to spend all that money on something that is little more than a constant worry. That's quite an expensive form of masochism in anybody's book I would think.

Anyway, to round off this week's witterings, here's a lovely picture. In the absence of any pictures of me driving, and not having to hand any photos of the planet Dil-- Dido, here instead is a shot of a rather-fetching singer. It may seem a rather strange decision to bung the singer Dido in here when the column isn't about her, but the decision has been made now and it's too late to reverse it.

Well, it's not so much that it's too late to reverse, it's just that I'd rather not...