"I still can’t get my new i-box to work."— "I-Pad," I say

BRISTOL Airport — and I am walking towards my mother-in-law’s car burdened by my luggage and a nagging sense of guilt about having dissed her driving in last-week’s column.

“Still writing away?” she has just asked me conversationally.

“Yup,” I have just answered.

“What’s the name of the paper you’re writing for now?” she says now, walking down the car-park steps.

“Is that your car over there?” I say.

The business of writing about my family every week is littered with moral pitfalls; perhaps, I think, walking on with my mother-in-law [left, right, left], it was unfair of me to assume, ahead of time and in print, that “she remains as oblivious to the lethal perversity of her driving-style — hare on corners, tortoise on straight — as ever she was”.

In writing a weekly column such as this, it’s tricky to get the balance right all the time. Perhaps this time, I got it wrong.

I mean what with the hip-replacement, and being 84, I notice she isn’t covering ground with quite the same speed as she used to; chances are she might be a little more cautious about speed all-round. Speed in a general sense, so to speak.

She approaches the car, each step proclaiming drive, drive, drive. I walk beside her, each step proclaiming death, death, death and I find myself hoping very, very hard that my assessment of her driving might indeed have been unjust.

Sometimes in life, it is essential to let hope triumph over bitter experience, just to get yourself through.

Climbing into the passenger seat, I try to distract myself with the thought that my mother-in-law never reads anything I write; she only takes the Daily Telegraph and reading online is as yet, beyond her. But that nagging sense of unease remains: ethics are ethics, and that is the point.

Reversing out of her car-park space she says, “I still can’t get my new i-box to work.”

“I-Pad,” I say.

“That’s the one,” she says, “I mean everyone keeps saying how wonderful e-mailing is. But I don’t know — I prefer the telephone. And as for reading on it — what’s wrong with a book?”

“Nothing wrong with a book,” I say, for I have my interests to protect: she won’t find my columns in a book.

“Though it’s very kind of you to say you’ll help me with the ibox,” she continues.

“It’s no bother,” I say, “we’ll have a look at it together after dinner.”

As she drives, she chats. But I have been ordered not to chat back. “She can’t afford to take her eyes off the road,” my husband warned, “and if you talk to her, she will.”

“I wrote a letter to the editor of the Telegraph,” my mother-in-law says, coming into a sharp bend.

I look for the most minimal response, deciding on “mmm.”

“I showed it to my friends,” she says, coming out of the bend, “but they advised me against sending it.”

“Mmm.”

“It was about paedophiles — what I would do with them if it was left up to me.”

“Mmm.”

After several bends, and words such as “briskly,” “private parts,” “cut,” “secateurs,” and “individual polythene bags,” I have got the general gist of her letter. “Mmm,” I say.

“What do you think?” she says, “do you think I should send it?”

We are on the straight bit of road but there are crossroads looming; I venture only to say that her secateur idea doesn’t strike me as truly workable solution. Not globally.

“I wrote it in a temper,” she says, “it made me feel better at the time. Such terrible things you read.”

She takes another bend and returns to the topic of her i-box. I revert to my mmm’s.

“What about Googling?” she says, swinging into her drive 45 later. “We could look your columns up on it. I’m sure your mother said that’s how she reads them. On Google.”

She switches off the engine. I stare at the dashboard. “It is a day for moral pitfalls,” I think.

“I think we should focus on e-mail,” I say. For I would like to be able to report in print, without fear of discovery, that my written assuptions were neither premature or unjust: my mother-in-law remains as oblivious to the lethal perversity of her driving-style — hare on corners, tortoise on straight — as ever she was. Ethics or no ethics.