Always something new!

The inaugural trip of The Beast was successfully undertaken this morning.  I do not count the tripette to pick up Brian and Hilary yesterday evening minutes after I had taken delivery of The Beast and was a little less than confident about how the thing worked.

At least I can feel smug as I drive along because, not only am I saving money, but also I am helping the environment.  In the sense that I am not as polluting as the other cars and my carbon dioxide emissions are not as great.  So, to be exact I should probably say that my damage to the environment is not quite as much as others who speed past me and who do not have a hybrid engine or whatever it is that I have.

Having such an engine means that one can turn ignition on (or press a button in my case) and have the car leap into action in total silence.  One pulls away from the curb in a quite sinister lack of noise sort of way, and it can only be a matter of time before some unsuspecting pedestrian is mowed down by the Silent Avenger.

For the first time in my life I now possess an automatic – but there seem to be just as many options for driving The Beast than if it were manual.  The actual gear lever is simple: forward and reverse; but there is an extra setting for going down hills.  The actual drive forward has three options of total electric, eco drive and power drive – all achieved by pressing a handily located button. 

There are two brakes: one conventional and the other another button. 

Reverse, unsettlingly, has a beep like a reversing lorry and there are sounds the car makes which I am not used to in my normal driving.

All these things will appear normal and ordinary in a couple of days and I will have lost my fascination with the little illuminated picture on the dashboard which shows whether the petrol engine or electric motor is powering the car at each moment!

As with all new cars nowadays there is a continuing process of discovery as for example a questing finger unleashes a cup holder provoking it to lurch forward from the dashboard.  My mobile is now connected (allegedly) to the GPS and my automatic road toll payer is now established firmly on the windshield.

The most importantly (with Toni’s help) I have managed to link my iPod to the music system of the car and, at last, my full music library will become available to make the minutes stuck on the motorway in the mornings a little more endurable.

The pure mechanics are becoming a little easier with the difficulties in a fully automatic car being more in my expectations than in any hard to acquire techniques.  My hand still searches for the ghostly gear lever and my left foot seeks for a clutch which is not there; driving is a fully existential experience at the moment!

I must admit that I am enjoying driving at the moment and the linking up of the music system is about to make it much better.  It is good to have something to think about as you watch colleagues unravelling around you.

Please let me not give the impression that the cloth of my character remains unfrayed.  At this stage of the term adjectives like washed out, shabby, shredded and patched seem more appropriate metaphors to describe how I feel in what appears to be an unbearably, unendingly inexorable period of time that we have to stay before we are given time off for good behaviour.

Before we get to the Easter holidays we have the Meeting Which Dare Not State Its Day, to be followed in a sort of encore which Edgar Allan Poe would have been proud to drag from his diseased imagination of two consecutive days of after school meetings of the sort of pointlessness that makes a concept like “vacuous” seem positively crowded.

Today saw external examiners from the Cambridge examination board come and give our kids their oral examinations.  We are actively preparing for the next set of examinations, so that we can enter the next set of figures which seem to have a totemic significance for the powers that we, which is just as well because they have bloody little significance for anyone else!

Still, begone fond thoughts of education, and welcome thoughts about new gadgets which might be found in the car.

Another trip to school tomorrow and who knows what I might discover – and all to the music of an eclectic collection of music being played tune by tune in astonishing juxtapositions.