Shouts From Down Under

Can you drive a manual...life?

Our daughter is up to that stage soon, a few short months of safety still to go before the L plates go up on the car, and I have to take a back seat again while she gets her Learner Driver hours up. My wife finds it difficult to sit in the back with the lack of leg room and her arthritus, so it's up to me to be bounced around in the position of the past. A young one again, only it's not the youth I wanted. Cars weren't built for grumblebums to sit in the back.

She'll learn in our manual gear van, but do most of her hours in our Automatic Holden ?Commodore.

You don't have many Holdens revving around the place unless you live here in Australia. No need to talk about Holden taking all manufacturing away from Australia, or the arguements of GMH not being Australian in the first place. Holden was designed in Australians by Australians. That's my understanding of that anyway.

But getting back to learning to drive a manual, made me think of a lot of things we used to do manually. Things it's so easy to forget these days until a little kid says, Dad...or Grandad, or Omah, or Grandma...what is that thing? And you explain, oh son, that's a cassette that existed before cd's.

Or that's a clothesline.

Before there were clothes dryers you had to hang them out there, yes OUTSIDE in the elements, actually walk out there, through the back air lock, and manually carry a container of them (used to be known as a washing basket) across the germy grass, the filthy bacteria ridden dirt, down the weed and bug strewn path to that piping structure with cables on it. Those coloured plastic things with teeth? They were used to peg the clothes on the line. Those wooden ones? Yes, they were used to peg the clothes back before recycling. Yes now its all plastic and no wood. Can't recycle wood can you? Oh? You can? Well, lets get on to the next one...

Wallets, Yes, one time there was wallets to put a thing called CASH in, and other things such as bits of paper, bills of lading, receipts (no one could spell it) and promisory notes. Some had moths in them, the wallets that is, that flew out when they opened them, because they hardly ever opened them. (Mostly scotsmen I think)
Now you just have electronic banking and automatic swiping. That's if you aren't homeless, then you don't need money, you just need food.

There used to be a thing called washing up. Yes, a sink, suds and a soapy scrubber and you cleaned peoples food platters off by hand. Yep you touched peoples food scraps, and put your hands in water that cleaned germs off plates. A second person, yes two people or more operated this assembly line process, yes process workers they were, that's right, and they'd have fabric called Tea Towels to wipe the plates off.

There was CB radios, UHF's and Telephones before Facebook, Touchphones and Bluetooth.

Before A/C units people used to light fires. Yes, unsafe! Terribly risky practice with all the potential injury, cutting the fuel up out in the bush with all those snakes and stuff, axes and wheelbarrows to carry it to the fireplace, then the lighting of it.

There was once music that you made. Yes, no electricity, no devices of plastic, nothing except voices, hands and wood. Ok a bit of string maybe, cat guts and copper. Ok they still have them now, but still. IT WAS MANUAL. It WAS!

I'm saying that writing is a manuallish sort of thing. Cavemen did it with their sticks and paint. They wrote on themselves, scratched pigment into their skins. Yes, that sort of story would be costly.

So, our craft may not have come far in the modern stakes, but as a way of communicating, and in the form of parchments, scrolls and now books, I think we'll be around, doing this stuff, for a long time to come yet.

If the earth can stand such MANUAL PASSION for much longer.

I mean there's manual CONFLICT, manual ROMANCE and manual HEROES, HEROINES and manual PUBLISHERS.

Manual typewriters and manual...

REJECTION SLIPS. not that I have many yet. Only one from last year.

That means that I haven't submitted to enough publishers yet, doesn't it?

eSUBMISSIONS and manual SUBMISSIONS.



Sparky