Disgressed

Legh, my brother-in-law, is a driving instructor; at weekends he works at Mercedes-Benz World, where underage drivers can have a go in a real car. They’re all automatics, so it is pretty easy (‘…all I have to do is tell them – that pedal makes it go faster, that pedal makes it stop, and you steer with this…‘) and obviously on the special track there’s no traffic problem or other complications. He kindly arranged for the girls to have a go.

Mercedes World is housed in a striking new building where they have a collection of noteworthy cars, back to a replica of the original vehicle built by Mr Benz. As the first carriage powered by an internal combustion engine, this has a good calim to be the first modern car, though it looks like a sort of motorised park bench.

They also have a huge limo which according to legend was used by the Queen and Prince Philip on a State visit.

“Ah, Your Majesties like of course the Rolls Royces, but here we think we have something you will also like. This car is the first in the world with electrically operated windows.”

Prince Philip did like it, apparently, and spent the whole of the journey winding the window down, doing that curious rotary wave that the Royals favour, and then winding the window back up. When the Royal party got back in the car later, it wouldn’t start because the battery had been flattened by the excessive use of the window motor.

“Hmn. Well, that doesn’t happen with a Rolls Royce.”

I thought Elizabeth would particularly enjoy the driving experience, because I remembered how pleased she had been to discover she could drive the cars at Legoland when about eight years old. She didn’t seem all that excited however, and merely said it was ‘alright’. But it became clear that this was just a teenage thing.

“You know,” she said, “I had to work really hard to stop grinning. I was like biting my lip and things.”

“You could have grinned if you like.”

“Yeah, but… Anyway, I’m going to text my friends.” She kindly allowed us to follow the ensuing conversation.

“I’ve just driven a Mercedes! lol!”

“No way! Who with?”

“Mario!”

(To my masculine mind this would have raised confusing ideas of Super Mario Kart, but we were in girl world here)

“If you’re driving now, can you take me shopping?”

Anyway, I think that all means she really, really did enjoy it.

“I love this day!” said Elizabeth, “Chocolate and snow!”

It is bizarre and contrary to nature that there should be no snow all winter, and then a White Easter. Which in a deeper sense means that it is absolutely in accordance with our weather traditions, of course.

This year I went over to William Curley’s shop in Shepherd Market to buy an egg. Curley is it at the moment so far as chocolate goes; I keep reading about how he’s at the forefront of the movement for fresh chocolate, as contrasted with all that Belgian, preservative-filled stuff you thought was supposed to be good. The shop is actually a kind of cafe where you can sit down and have a three-course meal of chocolate and chocolate patisserie if you’re so inclined (i remember coming across an establishment like this in Oban). I was served by a very well-spoken and somewhat confused lady.

“Could I take one of your Easter eggs?” I asked, pointing at one.

“Oh, yes. Which kind would you like?”

“What are the differences?”

“Oh, they’re all the same.”

I don’t know whether there were any differences, but the one I acquired was certainly an impressive sight, made to look as thought a lower layer was showing through a kind of slash; the lower layer brushed with gold and incised with hieroglyphics. The egg and its pretty contents – little nutty things and stick-like orange chocolate things – are delicious, though to be honest I’m not sure my palate is educated enough to really appreciate how good this is said to be.

By tradition, the girls arrange an egg hunt for the adults in our house; Elizabeth has lost interest by now, so the task devolved upon Sarah this year, She devised a set of clues for each of us: here are mine. You had to guess the missing last word.

• These go high so take good care, it is on the Hallway [stair]
• This is near the com’, it’s on the rack of CD [roms]
• You can see the life so still, it is on the window [sill]
• When we got this, it was big news, it is where we put our [shoes]
• You are now doing fine, so treat yourself to a little [wine]

I’m happy to say I won the race, though Katharine disputed it on the grounds that I had failed to pick up the eggs.

I hope everyone had a happy Easter…

“How do I look?” asked Elizabeth.

“Very nice,” I said, “Is that new?” (I was reasonably sure it was, but it never really does any harm to air the question.)

“It’d just better be Mufti Day.” said Elizabeth, darkly.
Mufti Day is a day when you can wear ordinary clothes instead of your school uniform. I don’t know hoe the name of a senior Muslim official came to mean plain clothes: perhaps British soldiers in Egypt who dressed in native garb were said to be ‘in Mufti gear’ and from there it gradually became a term for any non-uniform clothes.

Elizabeth’s fear was that she would turn up at school and in spite of having checked the calendar and school notices many times over, would discover that everyone else was in uniform after all. This kind of mild paranoia goes back a long way, to the days when we used to toddle along to infants school. From time to time they would have a dressing-up day (Often it was Book Day, when you had to dress up as a character from a Book. Half the children would invariably turn up dressed as a character like Buzz Lightyear, from a film that was never a book. Since most of the rest were dressed as characters from books that were also films, it seemed a reasonable hypothesis that many of them were also thinking of the film, and that in spite of many Book Days, the school had not altogether succeeded in inculcating the basic concept of a Book as something distinct from an item of film merchandising.)

The nervousness always persisted until we saw at least one other person walking through the street in fancy dress. Ideally at least three people, since one other person could have made a mistake. At times we experienced the opposite problem, when Elizabeth was in uniform and we saw someone dressed up. Invariably this turned out to be someone from a different school, or at least from a different year, but for a few minutes we would face the awful possibility that she was going to be the only one in uniform.

I no longer suffer these worries myself. Partly, of course, that’s because I don’t wear a uniform, and am rarely invited to dress up as a favourite character – at least not during working hours. But in addition I’ve reached the age where one no longer really cares whether one looks stupid; and I’ve spent many years in central London where bizarre dress and general indifference combine to mean that there’s really nothing you can possibly wear that would get the attention of anyone but tourists.

Actually, that’s not quite true. There is the Woolly Hat. Don’t tell anyone about this, but I do own a sort of Woolly Hat. It’s not really very woolly at all, it doesn’t have a bobble or anything like that; it’s really pretty understated. When freezing rain or snow is being driven into my face by a gale (something that hasn’t happened much recently – thank you, Global Warming) I find that the Hat makes a helpful difference. But I do not put it on until I am out of the street wherre I live, and I stuff it back in my pocket well before I get to the station. I wouldn’t dream of wearing it in central London – OK, nobody cares, but I might meet someone I know, for heaven’s sake. So perhaps I too am not free of the fear after all.

It was Mufti Day, by the way.

Since February, an experiment has been going on on the Jubilee Line: on certain stations strange markings have appeared on the platforms at the places where the carriage doors are. They’re not all the same: there are crossed boxes, straight lines, slanted lines, arrows and so on. This is all part of a study to see which, if any of the patterns persuade people not to stand in front of the doors. I’m afraid the simple principle of letting people off first is not very widely observed, and at times passengers on a tube train can be faced with a bovine wall of people making it very difficult to get off at all without physically shoving some of them back.

The Jubilee line is a an odd choice, because many of the stations have platform as well as train doors (there’s a kind of glass screen all along the platform edge which makes it impossible to fall on the line, with doors exactly matching those on the train). In my experience, this means that people already tend to stand to one side of a door to some degree – it’s far worse on those lines where only the seasoned commuters can tell in advance whereabouts the train doors are going to be. I’m not sure how the results are being monitored, either – presumably by video, because I haven’t seen any operatives with clip-boards.

In my personal experience the results are relatively clear, anyway, though my fixed habits have prevented me from seeing whether all the different markings are equally effective. Let’s assume the platform is, remarkably, clear to begin with What typically happens is that two groups form on either side of the door. There might be a bit of covert jockeying for position, but on the whole things work out. Then an extremely, almost aggressively well-dressed young woman with loud heels clicks along the platform (not the same one, but it always seems to be someone who fits that description), and with a sneer positions herself bang in the centre of the markings. Somehow this is very annoying: I find myself wanting to shove her aside, or say something cutting (But what would do the job? “It’s always the Primark shoppers who are in a hurry, isn’t it?”?). It’s not really rational to be bothered about it, because in the first place it’s inevitable, and in the second, I don’t actually want to be first on to the train. If I get on first, I’ll be shoved to the centre of the carriage and then have great difficulty getting off again. But the even-tempered co-operation of the rest of the growing group by the doors is noticeably impaired. Then a train comes in and it turns out only about half the people on the platform can physically get on, not matter how often they’re enjoined to move down inside and use all available doors. When the doors close in the faces of the people left behind, do they move back behind the lines? It’s more likely that the next lot of people arriving on the platform find little clots of people already in front of every door.

Still, I await the official results with interest.