I am a good driver, oh yes I am

AMAZINGLY, that’s not an arrogant thing to admit.

In my first full year of motoring I’ve taken to the wheel for my Pass Plus, an afternoon with the Institute of Advanced Motorists, shopping trips, weekends away and blasts over the deserted backdrops just for the hell of it. I’ve survived breakdowns, locking up and slides on slippy roundabouts. I’ve driven everywhere from Carlisle to Caernarfon, in everything from the Ford Ka to the Morgan 4/4, and still I haven’t crashed.

Once my head had shrunk from the gravity of this achievement, I started thinking about my hard-earned, newly-won No Claims Bonus. And discovered to my horror the nice people in the world of insurance want to charge me more.

What? At no point in this article will I pretend to be the next Button (well, not much anyway), but I’m still struggling to see the sanity of charging a driver with No Claims Bonus – even one single, measly year of it – more than a newly qualified one. It’s madness. It’s the product of a damaged mind.

I like to think I'm au fait with most things motoring but car insurance – a legal requirement, don’t forget – just seems to have disintegrated into a world of meerkats and opera singers and talking telephones which sound suspiciously like Stephen Fry. You might not have to be posh to be privileged, but you do need an evening on the strong cheese to make sense of it all.

Tax is a trip to the post office. The MOT is a trek to the garage. Yet insurance, probably the most important part of staying safe and legal, is a minefield of stupid advertising jingles, call centres thousands of miles away and wacky websites insisting you compare them all. Someone really ought to invent a comparison site to compare all the comparison sites, and then see how that compares.

Naturally, my crime in all this is being male and under 25, so I accept that no matter how carefully I drive it’s going to be expensive. But I still don’t understand quite how a driver with a year’s dint-free experience is considered riskier than a brand new one.

With all the weirdness, the endless quotes, comparisons and follow-up emails, the only thing that’s likely to crash is my computer.