Shot Nav and how the Sarajevo driver went wrong
SIGN OF THE TIMES
WHEN I take a wrong turning in my car, I often think of poor old Leopold Lojka. He was chauffeur to Archduke Franz Ferdinand. On June 28, 1914 he was engaged in his chauffeur duties in Sarajevo.
Being asked to drive on an unfamiliar route, he took a wrong turn. In doing so, he drove his passenger back into the path of an assassin who had already given up on his mission. The assassin was returning disconsolately home when the Archduke’s car hove into view.
He duly completed his deadly business, and World War I was underway. The map of Europe, indeed the world, was never the same again, with World War II almost inevitable just over two few decades later.
Still, you have to sympathise with Leopold. We all make mistakes.
On the subject of navigation, a friend told me that, in the days before Sat Nav, she used to navigate tricky routes by driving around until she spotted someone who looked likely to be going her way. Then she’d follow them.
This seemed a bit of a hit-ormiss system to me, but I released that on the Continent it might just work.
Thus it happened that I once found myself well south of Paris, needing to get to Calais. Paris, in case you don’t know, is extremely difficult to navigate around. So I cruised along hoping to see an Irish or British number plate.
And then I saw it – a Range Rover towing a caravan. I tucked in behind it, and I nearly lost him/ her halfway round, but eventually we cleared Paris and were heading north-west towards the coast.
But at the time, pre Sat Nav, it made me wonder why cars don’t have such a simple thing as a built-in compass. Even today, a compass would be handy.
My car has loads of dials that I never use – rev counter, temperature gauge, all kinds of tripometers. But quite often what I really need is a compass. If you’re lost in Belfast/Dublin/Paris/London etc quite often if you know which way is north, that’s enough. You could use the trees, however. Apparently plants operate a system called phototropism – they turn their leaves towards the sun.
Thus should you find yourself lost anywhere in the northern hemisphere, study the trees and bushes around you. You should be able to notice that growth is slightly favoured on one side than the other, the southerly side. You can thus orientate yourself.
I can’t honestly say that this is infallible. But I tell you navigational aid that does work: just look at the satellite dishes. They’ll all be pointing south, towards the equator, where the mother satellites will be circulating. That really is Sat Nav.
Poor old Leopold wouldn’t have the benefit of satellites, Sat Nav, or the like. But maybe if he’d just looked at a map...
FOOD FOR THOUGHT
HAVING recently dined high on the hog in the Crown Liquor Saloon in Great Victoria Street Belfast, I was reflecting with friends how restaurant culture has changed in the last few decades in the North of Ireland.
I well remember that service used to be of the rudimentary style. A waiter might eventually put his newspaper down and enquire: ‘Are yiz gettin’?, and had you asked for red wine, you might have been asked if a white wine ‘with a wee spot of blackcurrant in it’ would suffice.
All changed now of course. Establishments such as The Crown serve delicate dishes like calamari with preserved lemon aioli, and in most restaurants they can tell a robust rioja from a decent claret.
So we’re a long way from the days when a Belfast restaurant was viewed as posh if they allowed you to pay for your food after you’d eaten.
Also a long way from an experience related by a famous food critic, the late Clement Freud.
He once reminisced about a trip to Belfast. Much taken by a sign outside a pub that said: ‘Pint, pie and a kind word – a fiver’, he entered. Clement duly ordered the special, was served an immaculate pint of stout and a serviceable enough looking pie; but the chat didn’t seem too forthcoming.
‘Hey! What about the kind word?’ he called to the barman. The barman came back, leaned over the bar, and conspiratorially whispered to him: ‘If I were ye, I wouldnae bother eatin’ the pie.’
An unlikely scenario in culinary Belfast these days.
TIMING’S EVERYTHING
NO clever intro to this item. No time to lose.
Subject: changing of the clocks to wintertime across Europe. The EU has proposed that this should cease from 2021. According to the plan, each member state must now decide by April 2020 whether they want to remain on summertime the whole year round. That includes us Irish. So it could be goodbye to changing the time on all our various devices from the car radio to the DVD player, or for older readers removing the masking tape. The proposed change has caused much discussion. That’s because time is money. It didn’t used be. But that was before the comin’ of the railroad. Standard time was first used by British railways on December 11, 1847. Ireland’s railways, then part of the British system, followed suit, and by the mid-1850s most public clocks were converted to GMT. Until then it didn’t matter that, for example, Dublin might be 25 minutes behind London time, or Galway a further 15 minutes later. You can see evidence of Ireland’s differing time zones by looking at sundials around the country which seem to announce the wrong time. Before the industrial revolution it wasn’t important; people rose with the sun and went to bed when it set. The only vague timekeeping was from the local church. The Angelus bell – the only mechanical contraption most of us heard for over a thousand years – marked noonday in the fields.
Noonday therefore varied – the further west you went, the later it was.
Then came the industrial revolution and the railways. The clocks in Dublin had to be the same as in London or Limerick.
Time is what stops everything happening at once; space is what stops it all happening in the same place. That’s basically what Einstein said. But both had a practical application for railway operators – stopping two trains from venturing along the same piece of track at the same time was sort of mission critical. Standardised time mostly held this type of catastrophe at bay – but the price was that it invaded all our lives, and has continued doing so for 160 years.
OK, must dash.
NAGGING MYSTERY
OLD Ireland still slumbers on. I was listening to a recording of comic actor John Fortune (pictured) — sadly no longer still with us.
He mentioned on the BBC that he lived in Ireland, and had been driving down a boreen when he found himself behind an interminably slow car towing a horsebox. It was barely doing 3mph. It was only when John drove right up behind it that he realised why it was proceeding at snail’s pace – the horsebox had no floor, and the horse was trotting along.
Why the owners had opted for this mode of transport, John never found out. Whether it had some Flintstone resonance, or whether the owners just wanted to keep the horse dry but couldn’t afford a fully equipped horsebox, i.e. one with a floor, remained a mystery.
COLD COMFORT
THE one thing we don’t seem to need to worry about any more in Ireland is snow. It’s almost the end of the winter, and at most we’ve only had a couple of worthwhile dustings. Even here, in the Cooley Mountains snow has been scarce.
It’s a pity, because I like the snow – and I particularly like the complaints about local councils being caught unprepared. Because I’m always caught unprepared.
I never have chains for my tyres, or carry a shovel in the car, or a sackful of sand the way my Da always did. Can’t be bothered. And I would seem to have a lot in common with a lot of other members of the public who accuse authorities of being caught unawares. And I love a bit of begrudgery.
But if climate change spells the end of snow in our climes, I’m going to miss the animal stories – such as how Dublin Zoo have to keep their giraffes inside during cold snaps ‘because if they slip,’ a keeper explained recently ‘they have difficulties getting up.’
Some days, don’t we all.