I seldom listen to the radio when I’m driving, but on a really long journey I might break the silence with a few bars of Marriage of Figaro. But I can’t sing to save my life, so I eventually put on a Mozart CD instead.
Mozart was a genius, and few have since been equal to this inspired tunesmith. However, this generation has a near equal – the trumpeter Wynton Marsalis - whose eclectic performances range from classic baroque to home-spun jazz compositions from his own prolific pen. He’s not a bad poet, either, and his latest album ‘He and She’ explores in a myriad of jazz forms, the lines and themes of his poem of the same name.
He reads snatches of the poem throughout the recording, which concludes with the whole piece as a single track. Marsalis has a mellifluous, hominy grit voice that sounds for all the world like that of the big coloured guy that used to wander about in an overcoat and a floppy cap telling us in a poetic manner why we should bank at Barclay’s. (I think).
Somebody bought me the He & She album as a birthday present (I am six and a quarter, today, June 12) and I would love to play you the whole thing. However, the best I can do is point you at this YouTube trailer and invite you to taste a morsel of the Marsalis genius.
You will hear only a snatch of the poem, and miss one of the best bits: “One plus one make two, Like you and me before becoming we.” I wish I could write like that.
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| You would hardly know it was there |
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There I was, nursing a coffee in the evening sunshine, minding my own business in a pub garden, when from round the corner I heard these three noises: a revving engine, screeching tyres, a loud CRACK!
A CRACK? I put two and two together and to my dismay it made five, at least. Some muppet in an Audi, showing off to his mates, had dropped the clutch in reverse and barrelled across the car park straight into my hitherto oh-so-pretty Lotus Elise Type 49.
“Sorry, mate,” he slurred, viewing the Lotus’s cracked clamshell with an unfocused eye. “I didn’t see it.”
What’s red, white and gold, sticks out in a car park full of silver cars like a red balloon at a Tory conference, and now is in bits?
“I’m really sorry, said Mr Audi. “Send me the estimate, and I’ll pay it straight away.” I did, and he didn’t. Watch this space.
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Lewis Hamilton and Steve McQueen in the same film? I you haven’t already seen it, go here.
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Those of you familiar with the A29 will know that north of Billingshurst there are several stretches of ruler-straight road along the line of Stane Street – the old Roman road from Chichester to London.
During the day, the A29 is often all but deserted, and so when I came up behind a Toyota Boring pottering along at about 40 mph in a 60 limit there was no problem in overtaking – the road was otherwise entirely clear. Another car was driving behind me and just as that went to overtake as well, the driver of the said Toyota at the very last moment swerved to the right to block the road. This he did three or four times although there was no approaching traffic and the national speed limit applies to the entire stretch of road in question.
Both of us were driving sports cars, so the second overtake would have been as swift and painless as the first. Instead, the Toyota driver’s sanctimonious enforcement of an imagined speed limit created unnecessary danger and the risk of a major accident.
If you happen to be reading this, Mr. Smug Toyota Boring driver, I was driving the Lotus that first passed you. Please get in touch, as there is something I should like to discuss with you; as would my wife, who was driving the other car.
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As far as I can make out, this new ‘scrappage’ scheme’ to encourage the purchase of new cars is entirely futile.
The £2,000 ‘grant’, derived jointly from the government and the vehicle maker will be made available only to owners who scrap cars more than ten years old.
I imagine there a few people driving 10-15-year-old cars out of choice. They do so because they can afford nothing newer, either because their income is too low, or more probably, because their circumstances prevent their achieving the necessary credit rating required to by a new car on hire-purchase.
Moreover, we are in the middle of a recession in which credit-worthy customers are struggling to obtain credit – let alone those who do not come up to the line.
Moreover, if there is a car sales boom now, there will be a consequent decline in a couple of years’ time: the trade is famously cyclic and troughs always follow peaks, and vice versa.
As for doing our bit to save the planet, this is palpable nonsense. China already increases its CO2 output each year by an amount equal to the entire CO2 output of the UK, and is opening a new coal-fired power station every five days. And the energy race and boom in cars sales in China has only just begun; as it has in India. And since both these nations give any notion of a global pact on CO2 emissions a stiff finger, any effort on our part is entirely nugatory.
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| If possible, please do a U-Turn |
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So concerned is the government about drivers relying solely on satellite navigation to find their way about, that it intends to add to the driving test a requirement that candidates navigate to a particular location using normal direction signs alone.
Candidates will be allowed to move their lips when reading the signs, but extra marks will be awarded for correctly pronouncing names like Hunstanton and Happisbrough.
It is sad but true that there is now a whole generation of motorists who arrive at their destination without knowing how they got there. But one man who didn’t arrive at all was the chap who blindly drove his BMW up a steep trackway to the very rim of a 100 ft precipice. It took nine hours to rescue him, and he has now been charged with driving without due care and attention.
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| India\\'s new people\\'s car |
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The big news in India this week has been the launch of the 1 Lakh (2500 dollars) Tata Nano people’s car. Looking like a stretch smart on castors, the baby Nano is powered by a small 2-cylinder engine and can just about manage to carry four people.
Just as the first Nanos were rolling off the production line, Rolls Royce announced to the world that its own ‘baby’ model - based on the 200EX concept car - will be powered by a 6.6-litre V12 manufactured by BMW. Rolls Royces were once very popular on the Indian sub-continent and frequently ordered in fleet quantities – one for each day of the week. With the recent emergence of a prosperous middle class, Rollers are once again proving popular, and no doubt the baby model will be snapped up in sizeable quantities.
Meanwhile, Tata will continue to churn out Nanos for a nation of poor people who can afford nothing better. I will let you know when the first models arrive.
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Cars no more affect climate change than do tumble driers. The cycle of climate change we are presently experiencing has occurred several times before - long before cars, long before people. We should be spending our money not on trying – Cnut-like - to prevent the inevitable, but on finding ways to live with the foreseeable and predictable changes.
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I thought I’d seen it all on Monday, when the North Downs turned into one giant ski slope, and even ambulances crashed off-piste.
But yesterday was worse. The snow – although still in evidence – had stopped, er…snowing, and instead we had thick fog. 50-metre thick fog – that’s 4 coach lengths – and thickening.
Or sickening, I should say, at least when it came to the crazy, mindless antics of people who were driving in appalling visibility yet gave not a single thought to switching on their car headlights. Although judging by the majority of culprits, my guess was that they did think, and thought “Am I bovvered?’
About one car in ten loomed suddenly out of the fog with not so much as a nite lite in the window. About half the rest though that side lights would do, which, considering the conditions, would be like trying to land a Jumbo at night on a couple of bicycle lamps. And the silly thing is, the drivers had gone to the trouble of switching on some sort of lighting and then presumably decided that switching on their headlights would be a waste of a good battery. This despite the fact that they must have realised from the fellow idiots coming towards them that side lights simply could not compete with the fog.
I’ll give you one guess and at which combination of car and driver made up the greatest number of offenders – and I saw hundreds of cars without lights, by the way, so my observation and sampling was sound.
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South-east England ground to a halt yesterday. But it wasn’t so much the snow that caused the chaos, it was the drivers.
When you cocoon a driver in a car with ABS, ESP, traction control, and hill-start assist, he or she will never learn to drive properly, never learn to interpret the feedback from tyres, brakes, steering on so on – largely because there isn’t any: it’s all absorbed by the nanny mechatronics.
There are times when traction control and ESP do more harm than good – ask any experienced off-roader. Yet if the average motorist were told to switch off the ESP system and actually take control of the car, they wouldn’t know what to do.
And its not just the amateurs: I went out in my Range Rover yesterday – I live on the North Downs by the way, where the snow was at its worst – and during the course of the morning recovered several cars and two ambulances, and one of those was a Land Rover Red Cross vehicle – with a patient on board.
Various companies and organisations have today issued helpful press releases about driving in the snow. My own tip would be stay indoors, and leave it to people who know what they are doing.
But if you really must attempt a journey, first remove the snow from the roof of the car so that it doesn’t suddenly slide forward over the windscreen, drive with your headlights on, and drive gently: any sudden or aggressive control input will cause the car to skid. And as I teach novice off-road drivers: in conditions where there is little or no grip, brakes merely stop the wheels, not the car.
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