Poop Poop screamed Toad

There are many times during my day when I long to have been born in another decade or time. When I enter my bank to give them money (give them money), and I’m ushered away from seeing a real cashier like police moving onlookers on from a crime scene. When I’m staring at a computer screen typing a letter and it freezes or shreds my work for the 3rd time in succession, and I look longingly at my fountain pen and notebook. When I type a text on my latest ‘updated’ mobile phone and it gives me ten words to scroll down before letting me enter the word ‘it’, and remember the days before predictive texting. Or before mobiles. When people used to talk. Or write letters. Or whatever.

It’s not that I’m anti-gadget, far from it, just that I like simpler things. I like listening to music from the age of vinyl. Rhythm and Blues where you can hear the wind rushing through closely-miked saxes, and the cries for mercy from trumpets screaming in their stratospheric registers. Guitars coming through amplifiers distorted by knife-cuts made on speaker cones. Despite all of my searching, my car radio only seems to be able to give chic-flick style ‘hits’ from stars like Beyonce, where the sound has all the stimulus and taste of a Bachelor’s Tomato and Basil cup-a-soup served in a Michelin starred restaurant. Or middle-class offspring of non-descript comedians pretending they’re ‘down with the kids’ by putting a glottal stop into every word until the sentence is completely harvested of consonants.

It’s not that I want to go back to the days of workhouses or children up chimneys. Not all of them anyway. I’m not looking to upset Darwin by undoing Evolution either. I just like my life to be less cluttered by pocket organisers. Made less easy by labour-saving gadgets that make everything take 4 times longer. Less watered-down by safety harnesses and risk-asessments. I want to live finding things out for myself, doing it, rather than sitting on a sofa whilst the Sunday Telegraph tells me about all the stuff I should be doing but will never be able to afford to.
I’ve always been into cars, for as long as I can remember. I had the customary Lamborghini Diablo poster on my wall, but supercars were never my bag. I was always fascinated by the engineering of it all. Ladybird books lined my shelves as an encyclopoedia of how engines, aerodynamics and electronics worked, and I used this knowledge to aid my appreciation of cars. Everyday cars you’d see in supermarket carparks. Not just cars, I liked buses too, and lorries. I’d spend days reading about fleets of buses in hardbacked books, or watching videos of truck racing.

But like the rest of the things I enjoy, I like the simplicity and rawness of them. The supercars with their shiny gizmos that tell you you’re current line of lattitude and a picture of the nearest star constellation are all well and good, but give me a family hatchback and I’ll spend an hour admiring the way a design team has tried to tailor it to a lifestyle. Show me a modern engine and I’ll yawn profusely and openly as we stare at a big bit of plastic trying to pretend there isn’t an oily engine there at all. Show me an old engine and I’ll admire it’s hand-shaped rocker cover and a distributor cap placed perillously open to the elements.

I drive a diesel car, which is odd for a self-confessed petrolhead. I should be driving a modern fuel-injected petrol/rocket. The thing is, there’s still very little gadgetry going on under the bonnet. Diesel cars are still unrefined machines. Once they’re set in motion that’s it, they’re away and need a mechanical or electrical component to physically stop them from chugging away in perpetual motion. It’s got a turbo too, my car. That means that when I press the accellerator there’s a whine from behind the dashboard as a tiny spindle goes around thousands of times a minute sucking in extra air, and a second or two later I get pushed back into my seat as my car surges away like a plane on take-off. I can hear the mechanics at work and feel their effect.

Call me pedantic, but I don’t get that feedback from my PC. Yes it whires and whines, but normally only when it’s about to cause me a great inconvenience. Yes my mobile beeps when I press keys, but only to tell me I’ve done something wrong or am asking it to do something it can’t or refuses to do. All the modern inventions and improvements do the same thing. They remove the user from any interaction. We’ll soon have fridges to tell us when food is going off so that we don’t even have to sniff or taste the milk to check it’s okay.

This week Top Gear is back on the TV, and I’m going to try to do a week of motoring related posts. I’m indulging that boyhood love of cars. The thing is, driving a car is one of the few things you need a licence for. You have to be tested before you can do it. I could go scuba-diving, abseiling, edit a newspaper or start teaching Pilates tomorrow without any government certification. I think that’s something worth taking an interest in (the driving that it, not me teaching Pilates).