It was an early start to the day. The alarm went off at 5.40am, instead of the usual work day time of 6.25am, as my wife had to be ready to leave the house at 7.20am. The reason for this was that she was being collected by her driving instructor for her final lesson before her driving test at 8.20am.

Twenty minutes after she left with him, I was also out of the house to start my commute to work, which consists of two bus journeys and takes between 45 and 70 minutes depending on whether the first bus arrives on time...which of course it usually doesn't.

I arrived at work with 5 minutes to spare but the coffee that a colleague had made for me and was waiting on my desk was to remain untouched. I hadn't even had enough time to hang my coat and the coat stand before I rushed out to one of our directors' houses to sort out a printing problem with his home computer.

Fortunately, this just proved to be blocked printing queue where a print job had failed and held up every subsequent print job until I deleted it.

On the way back to the office, I checked my mobile phone for missed calls and noticed that my wife had tried to phone me a few minutes earlier as she'd obviously discovered I was not at work.

On calling her back, I was pleased to discover that she had passed her driving test with only 6 minor errors! I was very confident that she would pass however as, until she forgot to renew it, she was the holder of a USA driver's licence already.

Although she had been living in the UK with me for 10 years, since 31st December 1997 to be exact, and had only driven a few times in the USA on our trips to visit her folks in Washington State, I knew she'd cope well with driving in the UK.

She's only licensed to drive automatic cars, but as she has never driven "stick shift" cars and doesn't intend to, this is fine.

As per usual, a celebratory Indian meal occurred this evening!

Hopefully, she'll find a job soon and we can afford to take our banger of a car off my father's driveway!