Driving on sunshine into the future
“I HAVE seen the future, and it works,” wrote the legendary New York newspaperman Lincoln Steffens in 1919.
He had just visited post-revolutionary Russia and was giving his impressions of the new socialist state in a letter to a friend. These were red and rosy, as expected.
There is a famous photograph of the veteran Steffens and the young Ernest Hemingway together at the Lausanne Peace Conference in 1922 when politicians were putting the post-war world to rights and Hemingway was a correspondent in Europe for the Toronto Star.
I thought of Steffens’s phrase — which seems to have entered the history books as much as “I could have been a contender” (scripted by Budd Schulberg for Brando in On the Waterfront ) — when I came upon an English couple’s excited comments on how solar power alone was driving their electric car.
The couple, from Alton in Hampshire, pointed out in a letter to a newspaper that, although solar panels on their home just occupy one-third of the roof space, on a summer’s day this produces enough power to drive their VW car charged from a plug in the garage.
James and Lesley Willis enthused: ‘‘Going for a drive in serene, effortless, near-silence, knowing that it hasn’t cost anybody anything, is quite simply wonderful.”
They are driving on sunshine, they say, with nil use of resources, nil pollution and nil drain on the national power grid. (Here, I beg the indulgence of our Motoring Editor Campbell Spray for driving into his territory but I confess to having been knocked over by this image of totally ‘natural’ motoring which can be the near future on wheels.)
Last Sunday, I was ‘clipping the hedgerows’ in my ancient Citroen to make a car test appointment on time in a provincial town. I made it — as did the car, with flying colours!
But before all that there had been a first sighting of a red admiral butterfly, another red-letter event, as so far this year I have just seen some small common blues and the occasional brassica white.
The admiral is a beauty (called admirable, originally) and I have memories of clusters on bushy vegetation on Howth’s seafront and guzzling nectar on lilac-blossomed buddleja falling in perfumed tresses from old walls.
This is almost ancient history now as the insects so far this year have not shown an expected recovery “to adorn the world and delight the eye of man’’, as 17th-century parson-naturalist John Ray put it.
But the opposite is true of songbirds whose numbers are up and prospering, along with the fruits of hedgerows and gardens.
Many fledglings are making their way in the world (pray to keep cats and magpies at bay) and last week, a song thrush family, now almost a rare sight, were picking their way among raspberry canes and an ancient bitter cherry tree having a fruit feast — happy birds in sunshine days.
“Eat more fish,” proclaimed a large roadside to catch motorists’ eyes near Drogheda. We heartily concur but the big question is will there be enough to go around after Brexit decides ‘no EU nets allowed here’?