Passing a driving test doesn't automatically turn you into Jeremy Clarkson. It takes years of practice to master the car properly...

OKAY, so when you learned to do something, could you do it perfectly straightaway? If so, you're darn sight cleverer than the rest of us. Whether it is using a computer, programming the video, tiling a wall, learning to knit or just separating an egg, there's a big gap between knowing how to do things and doing them easily and confidently. However well you have been taught, it still takes time and practice.

And it's the same with driving.

New drivers will always be more vulnerable, more likely to have accidents - simply because beginners will always make mistakes. That's the nature of learning.

And any driver knows, it's only once you've passed your test that you really learn to drive.

So we must be patient with youngsters, allow them some time to get the hang of it, expect mistakes to be made and cars to be biffed.

But - and it's a really huge but - cars are a lethal weapon. New figures this week showed deaths of teenage motorists had soared. But there are some easy ways to keep our youngsters safer.

P plates - warns the rest of us to be wary.

Limit the power of cars new drivers can drive - though the price of insurance already does this in a way.

Curfew - let new drivers out only in daylight. In winter, this will also save them from the worst of the ice and fog.

Limit the number of passengers, maybe just to one. Many crashes occur when there's a car full of lads showing off. We all know that the more teenage boys there are together, the lower the collective IQ is. By the time you've got six of them squashed in a car egging each other on, you'd find more brain cells in a cabbage.

Keep cars cuddly. Hard for cars to be lean, mean testosterone machines if they look like something Noddy drives.

And as a consolation for that lot, maybe we could let them start learning younger, at 16 perhaps. Trouble is, of course, when we've clipped the wings of our by and large law-abiding youngsters, there'll still be lawless lads who will drive untaxed, untested, uninsured.

Bad enough that they'll kill themselves, but the worry is who else they will take with them.

And all the P plates in the world won't keep them safe.

IWAS down in Oxfordshire with my sister at the weekend, where the ground is rock hard and so dry that they started a hosepipe ban this week - much to her disgust as a fanatical gardener.

Meanwhile, up here, we are surrounded by overflowing streams, full reservoirs and waterlogged fields. As we can get oil from the North Sea, gas from Russia and baby carrots all year round from Africa, is it really beyond the wit of man to get water from northern Britain and transport it down south?

After all, surely it's downhill all the way.