Clocking it is something else.įor example some years ago my cousin shared a video of her son opening his Easter eggs. How are folks my age now supposed to learn how to be old if we can’t be around older people?Īnd, our wider family too is not an unexpected influence. As soon as I passed my test I found myself doing it unconsciously as a safety step, or as a small way to maintain a connection to my mum as I grew away from her past 17 and the age of driving lessons?įor the past year and a bit the generations have been all but barred from mixing. I didn’t copy my mum’s weird driving tick when I was small because I couldn’t drive. The way we learn things from our parents and don’t question them.īut of course we expect to be influenced by our parents in ways big and small. It’s apparently inconsequential but in fact it speaks to the atomised existence of families. I’m reminded of the iconic scene from the very excellent film Barcelona in which Chris Eigeman’s character Fred goes off on a tangent about which is the right way to shave. It’s in spending so much time around the same people and learning from them.

It’s one of those tiny inconsequential behaviours we imbibe from our parents. Even though my current motor has no choke. Choke in, in the right gear, handbrake off. My first car had one and I never did get the hang of it) then the gear stick then the hand brake.

Whilst driving my mum would automatically press her finger against the choke (yes, I’m old enough to remember when cars had a manual choke. I’ll take the incidents that inspired me in reverse order.ĭriving at the weekend I unthinkingly moved my hand to check three things I no longer have to check in a modern car. It’s a call to model something different so we can build back better.

As the lockdown unwinds in earnest (got my tickets to the zoo booked already) I got to thinking about all we’ve lost living such an atomised existence through the pandemic.īut this isn’t a paean to what we’ve missed.

The Gender Agenda by James Millar