On the road again …
Yesterday in total I drove nearly 300 miles in the cause of taking my aged parent from the south coast to a rapidly-expanding new town north of Oxford for a family lunch, back again, and then onwards to my home in south-west London.
I’m not saying I wasn’t tired at the conclusion of this epic – I’m in my mid-sixties, so one wouldn’t expect anything less – but today I want to pay tribute to my car, a large 4 x 4 that I bought about five years ago largely on the recommendation of my son when I had revealed that I had been suffering for a while from a bad back.
His diagnosis was that a potential factor was probably the low driving position in my then current Audi A3 hatchback, together with the associated ‘getting in and out’ of the vehicle, and that – if I bought a 4 x 4 – this might help.
It did. My back issue faded away within a month, never to return (well, so far).
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I am a huge fan of my nine year old VX Touareg. Despite having ‘off-road’ pretentions – it can comfortably negotiate ploughed fields and sticky/muddy lanes that the owner of a hatchback or saloon might avoid unless forced – it drives and handles more like a large, high up, ordinary car than a real (working) 4 x 4 of the Land Rover Defender or similar variety.
I love the ‘above ordinal mortals and traffic’ driving position, the sheer comfort of the leather seats and, this a seeming consistent quality of German vehicles, the way it eats up the motorway miles with its 2.7cc (litre) engine, even though these days VW only make the more powerful 3 litre version.
It does have its disadvantages.
I was one of those poor saps who got into diesel-powered cars because my ‘petrol head’ pal recommended it – this, of course, was in the days when the government was encouraging such a move on the grounds that diesel engines were no longer noisy, they gave better mpg and were far cheaper than unleaded fuel-powered equivalents.
Ten or fifteen years ago we now know that diesel cars are a scourge upon the planet – filthy emitters of carbon whatever-it-is that is single-handedly causes 50,000 deaths per annum and, of course, devastating global climate change … and that was before its stupefying effects upon human brains prompted certain otherwise totally honourable car manufacturers to deliberately start cheating sundry governmental fuel emissions tests.
This is why owners and drivers of diesel-powered vehicles are now pariahs. It costs me £550 or something simply for road tax, another £300 for a resident’s parking permit, plus I’m discouraged from driving on London’s streets – and, inevitably, now that the government has done a U-turn on diesel, I’m paying far more for my fuel that I would be if I’d stuck to unleaded and not (as I did) taken the decision to ‘do the decent thing’ at the time and switch to diesel (as government was encouraging me to) in the first place.
At some point in the not too distant future I shall be reluctantly getting rid of my Touareg for age and cost reasons, plus the notion that occasionally I like a change of vehicle anyway.
Firstly, mostly I drive around in it solo, which is a bit absurd in itself from a planet-saving point of view [well, save that, as I understand it, China apparently builds over fifty coal-using electricity-producing power stations per annum so frankly what I personally get up to counts for precisely diddly-squat in this respect].
Secondly, being of my time of life and financial insecurity, it makes solid sense to ‘downsize’ from my expensive monster to a little run-around car that potentially does say 60 mpg rather than 31 or 32 mpg and can be parked on a postage stamp instead of (as now) needing its own postcode.
And that’s it – testimonial over.
Except perhaps to add that, in terms of my state of unexpected general sprightliness upon reaching home at the end of yesterday, the human body – even one of my age – is a wondrous thing.
I’m referring here to that capacity it has to subconsciously (physically) anticipate what data its brain is processing.
Take yesterday. I’d known for about ten days that yesterday’s taxing excursion was probably on the cards.
As a result, without me realising it (in an active sense) as it was doing it, my body was quietly preparing itself for the ordeal. By the time the weekend dawned it was in such a state of heightened readiness that – had some third party higher authority announced that the entire thing was either postponed or cancelled, or even that a set of circumstances had arisen (e.g. I’d won a lottery competition in which the first prize the use of a luxury helicopter for the day piloted by an expert) whereby I might not have to put myself through the driving aspect – I might even have declined it.
To anyone who had pointed out the advantages of my above hypothetical good fortune – i.e. that taking the helicopter would save me the hassle of driving all that way, plus the attendant tiredness and/or stress that would accompany the task, I might easily replied that actually these things were of no consequence because for days now my body had already been preparing itself for them by storing additional reserves of energy and concentration specifically for the purpose.
That was why, last night, to some surprise to your author, the third and last leg of yesterday’s journey – from the south coast to south-west London – was the least stressful and energy-demanding of them all. My brain was practically running on automatic pilot – my mind had accepted that the trip was just going to take as long as it took, there was no point in worrying about it – and we shot through in a regulation 90 minutes, i.e. the standard time I have allocated to that distance and route, without consciously pressing on and ‘racing’ at all (as I perhaps normally would).
It’s a funny old world, as I think Greavsie once said.
