I WILL never forget the joyous day I passed my bus driving test. It was in 1995 and I had been learning at a driving centre in Glasgow.

On the first day of the course, I had been taken into the city centre in an old bus.

“On you go,” said the instructor to me as he vacated the driving seat. There was heavy traffic and, needless to say, I’d never driven a bus before and hadn’t expected to at this moment either.

“You mean drive the bus?” I foolishly asked.

“That’s why you are here, isn’t it?” he replied.

I was on the bus with two other learners, as well as the instructor. We had been given some rudimentary instructions by him as he’d driven the bus into the busy city centre, but I hadn’t realised we would actually have to drive the bus through busy streets.

That was the first time I had driven a bus. It was, of course, an assessment of my capabilities. I negotiated as best I could and quickly learned what a tail swing was, as I nearly shaved off the nose of a woman who was standing on the edge of a pavement waiting to cross the road!

The gearstick felt like it had been cemented to the vehicle, making changing gears a Herculean effort, with the engine roaring as I struggled to crunch it into gear. I drove slowly and cars began honking their horns in frustration.

There was a big L on the rear of the bus, but I think when people see a bus in the city centre they assume the person driving actually knows how to drive a bus!

It was a stressful 20 minutes and, when I finally pulled over, the instructor looked at his notes shaking his head. I cannot repeat what he said, but it was a generally negative assessment with lots of adjectives.

Yet I wasn’t written off and was told I needed six full days of lessons as a minimum before sitting my test. Against everyone’s expectations, including mine, I passed first time.

I had done it and realised one of my life’s dreams.

There was a specific reason I needed a bus driving licence: I wanted to be a driver guide and take people around Scotland on tour. My life had undergone some dramatic changes and my life ambitions had changed as a result.

It wasn’t, of course, about money or climbing a career ladder, but about the hopeful expectation it would make me rich in experiences and give me a new angle on life.

My head and heart were full of Scotland’s stories, and this seemed a perfect way to use my love of history and folklore, and share my passion for the landscape that held so many personal memories for me. I felt my life was about to be transformed; and indeed it was.

So that day I passed my bus driving test was a day of utter joy. Although over 25 years ago now, I can still feel the elation.

I worked for different tour companies at different times in my life over the following 20 years. It was something I could return to whenever I needed it. During the last period of my time as a driver guide, a transport manager called Ronnie worked miracles as he juggled my rota to fit round my very complicated childcare arrangements. I will be forever grateful to him for his understanding.

Were my expectations of the job realised or did I have an over-romanticised image of it? I’d say a bit of both. I tried my best to showcase Scotland, but I quickly understood people travel for different reasons with different interests.

But it opened a window on the world for me. I met so many people from different walks of life and different countries and cultures. It taught me so much about the way humans behave towards each other and how we handle and respond to experiences in differing ways.

We were all on mini life journeys together, usually three days, sometimes five. In this brief fleck of time, a small group of people would be together amidst the splendour, and sometimes challenging conditions, of Scotland. When connections were made, it was because of shared values, regardless of cultural differences.

I began to see the tours as a metaphor for the way we live our lives, not just in observing others but myself as well. I had never thought the job would be a lesson on the philosophy of life, but that is partly what it became for me.

It revealed to me that happiness, enjoyment and appreciation is a default within us, not something to be found, bought or acquired, or even weather dependent!

That now seems so obvious but it took years for me to truly understand how we can become so easily trapped in the hedonic treadmill. I know that’s a fancy term, but its meaning is simple: that as we go through life, we quickly take things for granted and so seek new and higher levels of satisfaction which we believe will give us happiness. While we can get a rush of pleasure and satisfaction in new things or experiences, we soon then take those for granted as well. So the cycle continues. We become like dogs chasing our tails in pursuit of what we think will make us happy or give us a more fulfilled life.

The tours taught me that appreciation is the key to this. You don’t have to be a tour guide to learn this lesson, of course, as we all have our life’s experiences that teach us. But that treadmill is so easy to fall into, even when you know it offers a false dawn. It can take a conscious effort to climb out of it.

That is when we need what is called a hedonic reset: another fancy term for stopping that chase of our tail and taking time to appreciate what we have. This can be done by temporarily depriving ourselves of things we take for granted and so regaining our appreciation of them.

A simple example could be when we go camping. I love it, but when I get home I appreciate my bed, my shower and central heating in ways I didn’t before we left on our camping trip!

The virus has forced a reset on all of us; it has taken away many things we took for granted: travel, staying with friends, family meals, a coffee and blether with a friend, hugging loved ones, being with loved ones, browsing in a bookshop. We will all have our list.

It has been heartbreaking, with devastating consequences for so many people’s livelihoods and emotional wellbeing, as well as a tragic loss of life.

It’s an unwanted, brutal and forced reset, but the life lesson I learnt on the tours has helped me understand that appreciation is the key to resilience and getting through this as best as we can.

When times relax, as they hopefully will soon, I know how much I will appreciate hugging my daughter I haven’t been able to hug for 10 months, being able to tell stories to a live audience and have a coffee with a friend in a real cafe. And travel to the places I love within my own country.

Perhaps if there is any positive out of this, I hope it will be that I will never again fall into that treadmill of taking things I have for granted.

So I say Happy New Year to you, and I mean it in a heartfelt way I never meant before.