I particularly like my manual transmission car for driving in hilly, rough country -- think your traditional private road in cottage country, pitched at a 25-degree angle and featuring deep ruts and potholes, large intruding rocks and tree roots. Perhaps that's because I learned to drive in an army truck on the Ponderosa training range at CFB Borden, where the objective was to prepare young soldiers to drive logistics vehicles and gun-tractors across country without benefit of roads.

However, I have also done time as a taxi driver, and I agree that someone who spends hours at the wheel in city traffic, especially in a hilly town like Halifax, has good reason to prefer an automatic transmission.

When I was in my mid-30s, many long years ago, I smashed the bones of my left ankle into little tiny pieces. Four years later, I did it again, with the right foot. (Ottawa. January. Ice. Both times.) The left ankle literally took years to heal completely, and for the first two of those years I did not drive at all because I could not work the clutch of my awful old Rabbit, and I was too poor (and too stingy) to buy another car. I moved downtown and learned to love public transit. The right ankle fracture was not quite as drastic as the left, but it nevertheless grounded me for another year just as the left side of my undercarriage was finally returning to normal capability. By that time, I had inherited my Dad's 1986 diesel Golf (an excellent car then only eight years old), so I put it up on blocks and committed myself to physiotherapy.

Oddly, it never occurred to me to sell the Golf and buy a car with an automatic gearbox. Fixed in my ways, I guess -- or perhaps as stiff in the neck as I was in the ankles.

Anyway, the ankles eventually recovered as completely as really nasty joint fractures ever do, and I am pretty well convinced that working the clutch was a positive factor.