Young driver calls on a hire power
People seem to like being chauffeur driven. I absolutely hate it
Variety is the spice of life. Travel brings variety to life. Therefore, too much travel makes life too spicy. According to my calculator, for the last two years I’ve spent an average of 57 minutes on a plane or in an airport, every single day. As someone without a single qualification, or any talent in art, travel is one of the few things in life I have down to a fine art.
You really need to, if it is to become bearable. Skill comes with practice, and practice I have had.
You need to know where the wall outlets are in airports. You need to know that smiling and being polite to customs will win you much favour, and you also need to know what bloody bit of paper they want to look at now.
You need to have a homing beacon which can point you in the direction of the exit of duty free, the path of true north obscured by an obstacle course of bottles of stuff that smells nice and bottles of stuff that tastes nice.
You need to know how to put headphones on, tuck your head down, drop your shoulder, and charge through to the other side like Jonah Lomu, as Mike Catt tries to fling you a Toblerone.
But there’s one thing I’ve never needed to master until now, and that
Strange experiences with other peoples’ parents
“When I was in high school, I was having dinner at my girlfriend’s parents’ place one night and she has two older brothers that were there as well. So I was setting my plate down at the table when suddenly I feel someone slap my ass, I turn around and it was her dad. We both just looked at each other and then he apologises and says he thought I was one of his sons. I could tell he was pretty embarrassed. That was an awkward dinner.”
Say what? New words to slip into your next conversation . . . Overtourism:
Where a site or destination becomes crowded out or in some way spoiled by too many visitors. Both Amsterdam and Venice have notably been struggling with overtourism this year.
A honeymoon, but with friends and family (buddies) along
Buddymoon:
for the trip.
Creepshot:
Typically a nonconsensual, sexualised photograph of a woman taken in public on a smartphone and shared on the internet. Creep refers to the discreet, voyeuristic, and inappropriate nature of the snapshot, hence shot. The images tend to be of buttocks and cleavage.
Eat like a gibbon
To raise awareness and funds for the Gibbon Protection Society of Malaysia, Grace Watson is spending a month eating only what a gibbon would eat and raising money for her cause on Givealittle. Most days she will have scrambled eggs for breakfast with spirulina or herbal tea. For lunch it’s fruit — apples, bananas, mandarin and edible insects. Dinner is mostly a mix of salads or slaws of grated beetroot, carrot, apple, with a squeeze of lime and some seeds, but unlike the gibbon Watson includes cooked food like vegetable soups. She explained that although she would like to entirely commit to the animals’ diet in order to draw attention to the endangered primates, she can’t be fully authentic because unlike the gibbon she is unable to break down nutrients from leaves. So far the gibbons will benefit to the tune of $1200 for Watson’s efforts.
One more strange name
A reader writes: “My husband had a mate at work, his name was Long No, they called him elongated refusal!”
is the roads of unfamiliar cities.
Christchurch’s fractured roads are so hard that they’re easy.
The police find it easy to catch drunk drivers, because the sober people swerve all over the road, and the drunk ones just plough on through.
There’s a certain resignation to the fact that you’re going to get lost, you’re going to swerve all over the road, you’re going to take a long time to get there, which removes any responsibility. Low expectations are often met.
Learning to drive there was a breeze — you just accept that the car is going to hit pot holes, and that neither you nor the car will like it, and hopefully your parents like you more than they like their car. Almost any damage to the vehicle is easily explained away with tall tales of deep holes.
Until now, my age had precluded me from being allowed to hire cars anywhere. The hire companies saw right through me, as best as I tried. After all, if you ask anyone if they’re a good driver they’ll say yes. Ask any young man and it will be emphatic.
So instead, I had to be nannied around in the back of an Uber.
People seem to like being chauffeur driven. It is apparently the pinnacle of wealth and sophistication, when your time is too precious and your hands too supple to be troubled by the hand-stitched leather steering wheel. I absolutely hate it.
I was once collected for a speech in Sydney by a hired car. It was for a fancy do and they had gone all out, bankrolled by the people with supple hands.
The car was a Mercedes E-class. I know this because, as I slid around on the hand-stitched leather in the back, I frantically googled the safety features of the land-yacht that was whipping me through the central streets of Sydney with little regard for red lights and less regard for common pedestrians, whose soft bodies were no match for this German engineered front grille.
The driver either was under the mistaken impression I was someone important and the paparazzi were in hot pursuit, or he wanted to spice up his own life with some variety, or he had spiced his dinner up too much the night before. Or, more likely, he had booked two jobs too close together. That was the day I looked down and discovered that “white knuckled” is not a metaphorical expression.
Regardless, be it because of that experience, or because I just like driving, I’ve always lamented the fact that my freedom while away for work is bound by whoever is arriving in whatever in however many minutes to take me wherever.
That was until my birthday last month, when someone somewhere decided that upon the cessation of day 7670 of my life, and the beginning of day 7671, I was now finally a justifiable risk to their insurance company, and a world of rental cars opened up to me.
Except for the big ones, and the fast ones, and the European ones. But if it looks like something Nana might whip down to the shops in, then I can probably hire it, after paying the age surcharge, and age excess reduction fee, and signing away my life and firstborn.
And as I collected the keys for the first time and trotted many fruitless laps of the carpark, I felt the same sense of freedom I felt the first day I got my licence. Young, wild, and free once again. Thirty minutes later, I was in a yelling match.
The GPS yelled at me, and I yelled back louder. The other drivers were sympathetic, they didn’t yell. I made my third consecutive trip across the harbour bridge, which was perplexing at the time, and only more perplexing since I’ve found out you don’t need to cross the bridge to get from the airport to the city. I wrote it off as intentional sightseeing.
It turns out unfamiliar roads are worse than unfamiliar cars. When I book a hire car, I need a higher power to come with it.
And hopefully your parents like you more than they like their car.