"One of the regrets I have about my public life is that I can't drive any more,"Hillary Clinton told a car dealers' conference on Monday. Among her most painful memories, you suspect this doesn't rank all that high. Yet the remark is a reminder of how wealth and power tend to separate people from normal life, and how they don't always like it. Clinton has not driven a car since 1996, on the instructions of the secret service, and it is something that her husband pines for too. "Whenever I'm on the golf course I always make them let me drive the golf cart," Bill Clinton has said.I know the feeling. I sold my last car in 2001 when I took a job in Brussels. Both there and subsequently back in Edinburgh, I lived close enough to my office to walk to work. After retirement, I never felt the need for a car, particularly in view of parking restrictions. Besides, a car seemed like a bottomless pit into which to throw money, given depreciation, insurance and petrol costs. Accordingly, it did not seem worthwhile to renew my driving licence when it expired.
So, unlike Hillary, I have no regrets,
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