Notes From the Hard Shoulder - James May [15]
And you can't nick them, because they are electronically tagged to prevent them straying beyond a radius of a few miles. This is a simple matter, one of utilising the technology so readily used to punish us as a means of liberating us instead.
I can't really see why it wouldn't work. This is the age of the true city car – a car owned by the city.
PART 2 – THE FUZZY EDGE OF
AUTOMOTIVE UNDERSTANDING
CHARLES DARWIN MAY BE ON TO SOMETHING
I'm always slightly surprised that my cat, Fusker, can't speak. I spend many hours talking to him, but it's always a totally one-sided conversation and the chances are that the only word he vaguely understands is 'Fusker'. And he can't even say that.
My other dependant, Woman, reckons he can't talk because he's only a cat, and that the evolution of cat technology is such that he just isn't capable of speech and for complex zoological reasons. But I'm not so sure.
In terms of the mechanics of speaking, the cat is as well equipped as I am. He has a voice box of sorts: a mouth, a tongue, teeth. These are what we use to form words. And yet still nothing of any consequence comes out of his witless furry face. Why?
I have been forced to conclude that Fusker remains speechless not because he is incapable of it, but because he has nothing to say. He has nothing to say because he hasn't done anything worth talking about. All he aspires to is another bowl of Munchies or the chance to go outside and look for a lady cat (even though he has no nuts, although he's too thick to realise this). He can communicate either of these desires with a simple bleat.
I suppose it's possible that some distant ancestor of Fusker, while chomping away at his cat food, came up with the design for a separate-condenser steam engine long before James Watt did. However, he could do nothing about it, so the idea went unrecorded. He could do nothing about it because he didn't have opposed thumbs, the very attribute that allowed humankind to fashion a pointy piece of flint into a farming tool and shake off the shackle of being a hunter/gatherer. It was a relatively small step from there to variable valve timing.
Since we're on the subject of tools I'd now like to talk about Mr Stanley and his famous knife. Any man who has owned a Stanley knife – and any man who hasn't is unworthy of his sex – will, at some point during the trimming of some linoleum or the assembly of a l/72nd-scale Messerschmitt 109, have stuck the eponymous craft instrument into his body somewhere. This week, I drove mine into the fleshy end of the thumb of my left hand.
To all intents and purposes, I now have only one arm.
If you'd like to go and stick your own Stanley knife into your own thumb, you will discover how difficult many straightforward life skills can become. Grating cheese, for example, or playing Scott Joplin's 'Maple Leaf Rag' upon the piano. This is what separates us from the beasts of the field and hearth.
Consider driving. I hadn't realised, until it was clad in a Beano-style comedy bandage, just how crucial a role my left thumb plays in this everyday activity. Denied the use of this vital receptor, driving becomes notably more difficult. Even in my old Bentley, which, as a slovenly automatic, does more than pretty much any other car to relieve its owner of the tiresome duty of operating it, I find my finer points of car control slightly compromised.
All of which brings me, eventually, to modern car technology and driver aids, most of which have their basis in micro-electronics. They are amazing things. The injection system of a modern diesel engine can provide five separate squirts of fuel, each minutely timed and of minutely different volume, in the space of one ignition stroke – an event which, at 4,000rpm, occupies just under 0.004 seconds by my calculations. I couldn't do that.
A drive-by-wire throttle, when you depress it in anger at the exit of a corner, will garner information from sensors monitoring, among other things, air density and temperature, limits of traction