My car isn’t the only thing that failed the NCT

I’m not grown-up enough for this particular test. I mean, real grown-ups don’t arrive at their colleague’s house with a bag of cans

To all of those people who think I am a real adult, I have a confession to make: I’m a total fraud.

I might have led some people to believe I was a proper grown-up – you know, the kind who forms sophisticated opinions, drinks wine from real wine glasses and pairs their socks.

Real grown-ups, I’m led to believe, don’t feel a compulsion to ring their mother when they’re sick, just so she knows about it. They probably don’t bring their clothes home to her to be washed at the weekend either, or steal food from her fridge when things are getting tight at the end of the month.

Real grown-ups don’t arrive at their colleague’s house on a Saturday night with a bag of cans, or spend their wages like it’s prize money. They probably don’t sleep with a stuffed teddy named Pongo that they have had since their first birthday (let’s face it: 23-year-olds shouldn’t be doing that either).

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Real grown-ups don’t give themselves a mental high-five after taking a four-hour nap when they arrive home from work. Nor do they have a habit of dropping their phone down the toilet when they’ve had a few too many bottles of Coors Light.

I am definitely not a real grown-up.

This unsettling fact became clear to me last month when I had to put my car through the NCT. I was feeling disgruntled that neither my father nor my boyfriend had made themselves available to come to the test centre with me. This is a man’s job, I thought.

Pitying me, my mother agreed to accompany me. I’d have been better off on my own.

We realised halfway down the road that one of the indicator bulbs had come loose – but I had solved this problem before.

While trying to corner a pothole and land on it at just the right angle so as to knock the bulb back into place, we met my uncle Sean. Great, I thought, now here’s one man who can get this problem sorted.

It took a simple twiddle from under the bonnet to put the bulb back in place. “Open her up there,” he said. And that’s where the trouble started.

I had absolutely no idea how to open the bonnet of my own car. I fumbled around the steering wheel, pushing buttons and pulling levers and moving my chair back and forth. Patient as ever, uncle Sean pulled his car in off the road and the four of us – me, him, my aunt Mary and my mother – fumbled around pushing buttons, pulling levers and moving chairs back and forth. But to no avail. Uncle Sean told us we should keep going or we’d be late.

“Late?” My mother asked, checking the time. “Well if you can’t make Castlerea in 15 minutes, you’re as well forgetting about it.”

Castlerea is most definitely at least a 25-minute drive from home, if you keep to the speed limits. Sometimes I’m not sure if she’s a real adult either.

When we arrived in Castlerea, I had a text from Dad: “Don’t forget to take off your hub caps.”

Hubcaps? What are hubcaps?

So there we were, five minutes late to the NCT centre, with a dodgy indicator, parked outside SuperValu, trying to pry the so-called hubcaps off the wheels of my precious Peugeot.

My hands were black with soot, and I had fallen on my arse while clawing at the hubcaps, during which time my mother had banged her head and lost her sunglasses searching for the lever for the bonnet, which she was convinced was under the glove compartment.

I rang Dad to tell him of our woes, and he kindly informed me, “Oh wait, love, maybe they’re alloys. You can’t take off alloys.”

Good sweet Lord. I’ll kill him.

We sped out of the SuperValu carpark, alloys intact and indicator still broken and then . . . bang! A nice big pothole. Fantastic. The indicator chimed into action just as we pulled up at the centre.

Confident that the indicator issue was the only thing standing between my beloved little Peugeot and her NCT cert, I was rather surprised to find out it had failed on a multitude of other issues, such as a leaking exhaust and a smashed back light.

Bringing your car to the NCT centre is not a man’s job; it is a grown-up’s job, and I’m just not quite there yet.

Twenty-three is a strange, liminal kind of age. We are fumbling through adult life, trying to hold it all together while coming to terms with bills, careers, relationships and friendships; all too aware that these really are the best days of our lives.

Being a real adult seems quite a distance away, but for now, it’s time to embrace the uncertainty and trust that some day I will realise the merits of pairing socks and having a savings account.