I drove down to London yesterday to visit my sister, who lives in the general vicinity of Wandsworth. Normally I'd use a more sensible mode of transport, but on this occasion the point of the trip was to bring some bulky stuff back to Cambridge for Mum to look after while Sophie's away in New Zealand.

I hate driving in London. Every time I do it, I vow never again, and someone always manages to talk me into it regardless. Still, I might as well keep trying. Never again!

When I first started driving, I had an absolute terror of London, because I'd heard so many awful things about London drivers. Driving around the M25 was fine, but I had a lifetime ambition never to take my car inside the region it enclosed if I could possibly help it.

I think I first broke that ambition by accident, by missing my turning off the M11. That was OK; I just turned round at the first opportunity and hastily went back, and it was still just ordinary motorway and roundabouts. Then I visited somebody only just inside the M25 on the north side (Enfield or thereabouts, if I remember rightly), and that didn't seem obviously scarier than outside.

With my confidence thus boosted, I made a couple of trips to places on or around the North Circular, and then one to the Isle of Dogs. That was where it started to get irritating, not because of the feared London drivers but because the road layout policy in London is alien to all my non-London experience and I can never predict what the lane system is going to do next. The last time I went, I had drswirly in the passenger seat being a full-time navigator and we still managed to take several wrong turnings and end up both thoroughly infuriated with the wretched city's road designers. ‘Let's never come here again,’ said Gareth. If only. Still, it seemed like an improvement to avoid London out of annoyance with the road layout than from terror of the danger to life and limb from the sinister phantom of the London Driver.

So yesterday I ventured into Wandsworth by way of the M4 and the South Circular. On the way in, again, I had a full-time navigator in the passenger seat, and apart from an easily corrected wrong turn in a one-way system five minutes from our destination, we got the whole journey done with only a constant background level of annoyance at the lane system: the road kept dividing into two lanes and back again for no very clear reason.

On the way out again, my navigator was missing: Mum didn't need to be back in Cambridge as early as I did, so she'd decided to stay a bit longer and take the train home, leaving me to drive all the bulky luggage home on my own. I wasn't too worried by this: getting out of big cities is always easier than getting in, because there are always lots of signs pointing to the motorways.

It went fine until I was nearly back to the M4, at which point I took a wrong turn at a roundabout because the right turning had no confirming sign. In retrospect, actually, it did: it had a sign after the turning, pointing back the way I'd come saying ‘this is where you should have gone just now’. The spiralling lanes didn't permit me to go all the way round and try again, so I ended up heading off in the wrong direction, and then decided to take my life in my hands by trying to find my way back to that roundabout without stopping to look at a map.

It worked, but only just. I turned off the random A-road I was on, and attempted to head back in the right general direction by counting my turns and hoping to hell all the turns were good enough approximations to right angles. Just as I'd lost count, I found myself at a crossroads in the middle of Chiswick which apparently hadn't heard of the idea that signposting the major motorways is helpful. Fortunately, I noticed a little brown sign pointing to ‘Brentford Fountain Leisure Centre’, and in a feat of memory which I'm still feeling smug about the next day I recognised that as the name printed on a building we'd driven quickly past on the way in to London five hours earlier. So I headed in that direction, and was right to do so; within minutes I saw the roundabout ahead, took the right exit this time, and was on my way home with no further mishap.

So I was pretty pleased with myself for managing to get myself out of that, but pretty irritated with London for requiring me to have that good a memory!

Also, this time, the real London drivers finally did make an appearance. I think they must have observed the same indecisive lane markings as me and drawn the conclusion that they were probably only advisory; so they kept treating ordinary one-lane-each-way roads as if they had two lanes, and overtaking me on the inside at moments that had me shaking my head and wondering how anyone who did that on a regular basis was still alive. Fortunately my driving experience to date had left me with good instincts for spotting someone about to undertake me and a good reflex response to start behaving especially predictably as soon as I notice anyone else doing something weird, and those kept me out of serious danger. I still felt like a herbivore among apex predators, though, and was very glad to get out of there.

Let's try this one more time. Never again!