Time evaporates, puff and gone. I’m running around while sitting, am always at a different place, barely in the now. But I think things will get slower while the heat increases.
Some come-down music by Murad KAJLAYEV (Eng.), Minuet (1966), hope you like it. I rise my glass to an un-eventful, peaceful week. One may wish.
I want to bring to your attention that blogging-friend AUSTERE was interviewed.
She translated “Hon’ble Minister Jagubhai” by the Gujarati author Pravinsinh CHAVDA into English (see here) – and her name is printed on the front cover ! You may find it strange that I mention this, the front cover – but if I remember it correctly the first translator whose name was ever printed on the cover of a German book was Harry ROWOHLT’s (Ger., Eng.) sometimes in the 1980s : Before that translators were hardly mentioned at all. Translating is one of the main tasks of any cultural occupation, we do it all in one way or another every day, and AUSTERE does it pretty good. And she writes her own texts, concise, dense, that’s why I read her blog for some years now.
This Sunday Music is a little number by Mary OSBORNE (Ger., Eng., obit.), No Moon At All ; she sings and plays a bit on her guitar, hope you like it.
(I only found out that the original uploader on youtube did not allow “playback on other websites” when I looked at the preview and clicked the video, so it’s one click more, and it starts on youtube in a new window – ach, warum muß alles immer so kompliziert sein ?)
So, I had my share of throwing around buses yesterday. It was a group of twelve people with ten vehicles, mostly buses like mine, but other modified cars too. I recognized some drivers from the first aid course weeks ago, and was promptly put in the old geezer group, ach ja …
We first watched an instructional film showing scenes of daily madness from a driver’s seat. George, the instructor in this part of the course, has seen it definitely too often. He stopped it at all the right points to ask questions, point out possibly dangerous situations, and spun his own yarn. At one point we watched a juggernaut on the right lane as it came over the middle line to turn into a small street. George stopped the film and told us happily “If you’d have tried to overtake here, your car would now slam over the curb, hit that lamppost & that would smash this pedestrian” – pointing to a small figure in the background I couldn’t barely see. Well I sat in the last row.
Then we drove to the “testing ground”, a large parking lot in another quarter of the city, where other instructors took over. They had strewn these orange cones all over the place, the official word for these things is “Leitkegel” (Ger., Eng.), old geezers like me also know them as “Lübecker Hütchen”, yes they were invented in Lübeck and look like silly hats.
My fellow old geezers and me started with the run & hit exercise. First they wanted us to brake the car as hard as possible (“You have ABS, show us that it works!”), do an emergency stop. Before we should guess the distance we’d need to bring the car to a full stop from a certain point at a given speed and mark this point with a Hütchen. I was glad to learn that I had the distance marked correctly, stopped without killing my cone, just shoving it. My colleagues thought they’d need more road to stop, so their cones were far out and not in danger.
Second exercise was to avoid an obstacle : Run-up, press the clutch, swerve around the plastic thingy : “You have ESP, show us that it works!” I thought that the distance between the last cone of my entry-zone and the obstacle-thingy was pretty narrow, two meters perhaps, but to my astonishment this worked, no bumps in my car, no cones killed.
Third was to combine the previous two : Thunder in, press clutch, break, steer, stop. And yes, I thundered in. And while I sat in my wobbling bus, thanking the inventor of safety belts and the squealing of tyres still resonating in my head, and asked myself what the heck had happened, one of the instructors moved over to my window and while watching me through his squinted eyes he said that he would need to remove me from this training course if I would not change my racing habits. This woke me up from post-swerving-coma. This time I had not used my own speedo, respectively the one we are officially told to use, the digital display of the tachographs (better visible & correctly calibrated), but I had stared the large table the instructors had installed right before the zone where the actual test was performed and the cars start to fly. I swear to GOd that this table showed exactly 50km/h when I came in, the speed we had to reach. It felt boldly like more than 60 when I struggled with my bus, needed much more space. The car behaved perfectly well, did what it was supposed to do, just with significantly more force than expected.
I guess I used some inappropriate words to express my thoughts (I cited Duke Nukem), the man did not come near my vehicle again, what I appreciated. Later I saw another trainer watch our vehicles from the starting point, watch the table, open it and turn some knobs, have no clue what he did there. He did this before the groups changed place.
Because meanwhile the old geezers moved on to the second part, maneuvering in tight spaces. It was fun and I like to do this. Since the arrival of power assisted steering one has not to wrestle with the volant any more, large regular mirrors and small additional ones nearly minimize the blind spot (it is still there, but significant smaller than years ago when I learned to drive a lorry), and – last but best – there are working rear view cameras that allow one to use every inch of space. The parcours were nicely thought out, from easy to demanding, slalom backwards was interesting.
All in all it was a useful training, meant to push the confidence in the car and in one’s own abilities. My reflexes still work, good to know, hope I do not need them.
This Sunday Music is Lulu Swing performed by the great Hänsche WEISS / Hänsche Weiss Quintett (Ger.), from the 1977 lp Fünf Jahre Musik deutscher Zigeuner, with WEISS and Lulu REINHARDT (Ger.) as solo guitarists – hope you like it.
Have a peaceful week, and avoid swerving buses, they really need a lot of space.
Buhaa … the heat arrived not like the proverbial sledgehammer, but it came in fast, over night. I am a bit irritated, or at least was it through the day ; actually I feel veryvery old, but not yet tired enough to crawl into my bed. My compatriots did feel the same irritation today, what was expressed in brainmelting driving this morning ; two blokes were on clear confrontation course and I avoided the impact only by brisk braking. One was seemingly still drunk from last night, or suffering from poor blood circulation, hypoxia & impending brain death. This one was really dangerous, the other was just terrible dumb.
Anyway the kids were delivered safely, they perhaps learned new words – I tend to use my natural dialect when I am agitated, one could call it colourful. The afternoon saw a giant traffic jam caused by accidents at a local bottleneck, construction sites on the Autobahnen (hence a lot of people taking oh-so-short detours through the city), and general madness on wheels. The aircon, while fully working, was struggling to cool down the car. Tomorrow I will receive a safe driving training (“Fahrsicherheitstraining”) (“bring your own operational vehicle !”), scheduled from early morning to late afternoon, yippieahyeah – pedal to the metal, electronic stability control is for the weak !
Wonder what they can teach me. Now let’s put an end to this chanson de geste (Ger., Eng.).
The title of this waffle is a line from Journeyman, take number five on Jethro Tull’s Heavy Horses (1978), GOd my memory is overspammed.
63 mago 