The New Road Code

With the boom in cycling and the increasing number of Australians taking to the roads and paths on their bikes, the Government has determined that there is a need for a new set of road rules that promotes increased awareness of – and by – cyclists. A highly placed public servant has leaked details of the new driving test that will be implemented to reflect these changes.

Q1. On a bike path, when is it appropriate to overtake?

(a)    When it is safe to do so

(b)   When the path is clear in front of me

(c)    As soon as I catch up to the slowpoke in front of me

Q2. How should you warn other users of the bike path that you are about to overtake?

(a)    By ringing my bell

(b)   By calling out “passing”

(c)    The aura of my magnificence is sufficient to alert everyone to my presence

Q3. When walking on a shared path, how should you respond if you hear a cyclist’ bell?

(a)    Look around to identify the location and speed of the approaching cyclist

(b)   Turn up the volume on my iPod to drown out that irritating noise

(c)    Nothing – any decent cyclist should be capable of avoiding me, my friend and our three unleashed dogs

Q4. When opening your door into oncoming traffic you should:

(a)    Check your mirrors and over your shoulder to be sure there is no cyclist approaching

(b)   Open the door and get in and out quickly to minimise the potential harm

(c)    Leave the door open and take a step back into the bike lane to stretch

Q5. What is the purpose of indicators?:

(a)    to let other vehicles know of my intentions when diverging

(b)   to flash once to let other vehicles know that I just diverged

(c)    to demonstrate on my driving test that I read the road code. After I pass they serve no useful purpose.

Q6. What are the regulations concerning bike lanes?

(a)    Only bicycles and power-assisted bicycles may travel in the bike lane

(b)   Cars may temporarily diverge into the bike line to avoid hazards

(c)    Bike lanes are restricted to two-wheeled vehicles. I can drive along the bike lane so long as only two of my 4WD’s wheels are in it

Q7. What are hazard lights for?

(a)    To alert other road users that my car has broken down

(b)   To reserve a car space during peak hour

(c)    To erect a magic aura around my car that prevents others from colliding with it and stops the police from booking me

Q8. When should you use the brakes on your bike?

(a)    To slow down as I approach pedestrians and other road users

(b)   At the very last second to adjust the speed at which I plough through a blind corner

(c)    Once I move out of the inner suburbs and sell my fixie

Q9. When is it permissible to ride your bike on the footpath?

(a)    If you are under 12, or accompanying a rider who is under 12

(b)   Where the footpath has a bike lane marked on it

(c)    When the traffic on the road is too crowded for me to overtake on the left

Q10. What is the rule regarding helmets:

(a)    I must wear my helmet securely at all times when riding my bike

(b)   It is essential to protect my handlebars by hanging my helmet from them

(c)    What is a helmet?

Precious Defeats Entropy

These days reading has to compete with many other forms of entertainment, and readers can be a fickle lot. It is a rare thing for a writer to keep a large audience engrossed in the doings of the same set of characters for a period of more than a few years.

Yet that is exactly what Alexander McCall Smith has achieved with his No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency series. Recently released, The Saturday Big Tent Wedding Party is the twelth novel in a series begun in 1998.

I have read all of the books in McCall Smith's series, and yet I confess to feeling somewhat dissatisfied with them. Like many before it, nothing much happens in the latest entry. The crime Precious investigates is pretty straightforward, and the over-arching character storylines are progressed at a glacial pace.

While reading the latest book, I began to wonder why I first got interested in these novels, and what keeps me coming back. I realised that, in reality, the first novel is a very different beast from its successors.

All of these books are about the same length, at around 250-275pp. In the first novel, McCall Smith needed to establish his characters' backstories. As a result, it packed in a lot. The author introduces us to Botswana, many of us for the first time. He gives us the story of Precious's father and his death, her disastrous marriage to Note, the loss of a baby, her introduction to JLB and Mma Makutse, and her struggles to establish her own business in a sexist society.

That's a lot of incident for a 275pp novel, which surely helped it to become such a hit. Yet none of its successors have been remotely like that. Instead they are quite uneventful, and filled with discursions into small matters, and fond recallings of incidents and characters from the early novels that readers are perfectly familiar with and don't need reminding of. McCall Smith seems to just let his characters muse for a bit about Botswana or their childhoods when he has run out of ideas for advancing his plot. It's not a good look to have multiple occurrences of pure padding in a 250pp novel.

Ongoing storylines such as the awkward romance between Precious and JLB, Mma Makutse's wedding and the apprentices' maturing as young men are played out agonisingly slowly over many novels, issued over a period of more than a decade in real life. It is 13 years since we first met Charlie, for example, and McCall Smith has scarcely bothered to develop his character at all. It is the best part of a decade since we observed the first encounter of Phuti and Grace. How is it that McCall Smith's audience is so accepting of sparse plots and a chronic lack of character development?

The answer is that these books are not crime novels but a celebration of the mundane and ordinary. Can anyone really claim to have been enthralled by a plot twist in one of these "detective" stories? That is not what they are really about. Readers identify with the slow pace of life and the detailed focus on everyday matters such as shopping for shoes, drinking tea and the love of a car. They are happy to read the author's endless and repetitive discursions about it. There is comfort in the familiar.

Most long series of books eventually succumb to a form of entropy, where the author and/or the readers simply lose interest. Eventually only fervent completists stay with the series. If we don't see characters developing then they start to become two-dimensional and we lose interest. You would usually expect that the appetite an audience might have for any long series must dwindle over time.

McCall Smith seems to have come up with a premise that works boredom and mundanity into the very fabric of these novels, and makes it part of their appeal. In doing so, he has locked in a vast audience that cares more about the discursions in his novels than for the plots.

There is every reason to believe that McCall Smith's readership will stay with his characters for as long as he is capable of tapping out his annual dose of Botswanan banality.

Lightning Strikes From the Inside

World Epilepsy Day, March 26

I am an epileptic, and have been so for as long as I can remember. As a child I was prone to grand mal fits. Ironically, I'm the only member of my immediate family who does not know what a grand mal fit looks like; I've never seen one. A friend of mine who once slept the night at our house saw me have a seizure. In the morning he was stunned - he told me that I had literally turned green. Not a pleasant thought.

It's said that some epileptics can feel a fit coming on - the smell of oranges is sometimes mentioned. I can't recall any of that. I only had grand mal seizures when asleep.

This has long since been controlled by medication. Mind you, some medications seem almost worse than the condition they treat. I was on Dilantin for a long time as a child. It has a list of side effects as long as your arm, some of them quite severe, including depresion and panic attacks. Others I've been prescribed include mysoline (rashes, mood swings), tegretol (halucinations, depression, heart failure), epilim (weight gain, hair loss), and lamyctal (weight gain, headaches).

These are strong drugs. Most of them are sleep-inducing and carry warnings against using them and driving. Ironically, some of them list seizures as a side-effect! My present cocktail is a combination of lamyctal and epilim. My neuroligst says that these two operate on the liver in opposing ways, so I have to take enough epilim to kill a horse just to reach therapeutic levels. When I lived in the USA, my doctor originally refused to prescribe the dosages I had been taking, as they exceeded USA national standards.

During adulthood I have had instances of absence fits. It's hard to describe what this feels like to a non-epileptic. The best I can manage is that it feels like somebody turned the lights off in my brain and then immediately turned them back on again, realising that somebody was still in the room. The author Paul Harding describes it as "lightning striking from the inside", which I think is an excellent description.

While the lights are off, I feel myself twitch a handful of times. I've done this in front of people and know that they do not see any twitching, so I think this is just some neurological effect in my brain. Often times, observers do not even notice when I have an absence fit.

Tests have shown that I can have convulsions induced by hyper-ventilation. A neurologist once induced a 90 second blackout by getting me to breathe into a paper bag. He cancelled my driving license on the spot, and I didn't get it back for about 15 years. Last year I had another incidence of this. I had a massive headache and could only deal with it by panting. I kept it up for so long that I started convulsing in the waiting room of a medical centre. Not fun for me, but better entertainment for the other patients than the decades-old magazines lying around. I did not black out this time, so it was the first time I'd actually observed myself doing it.

Now the worst thing that happens is occasional tics and jerks. I'm very hard on crockery and glassware, being prone to losing my grip and smashing them on the floor. Epileptics probably shouldn't live in places with tiled floors and granite benches. (I actually suspect smashing things may not be caused by epilepsy, but just general clumsiness induced by middle age).

I'm very grateful that I live in an age where the treatment of epileptics is far more advanced. I shudder to think what would have happened to me had I been born even 50 years earlier. It was relatively common in the past for epileptics to be institutionalised and for frontal lobotomies to be performed. As strong as my meds might be, I'll take them over that any day.

I'm also keenly aware that there are many people far more debilitated by epilepsy than I, who struggle to lead any kind of normal life. Just as I have benefited from advances in medical science, these people need further research into treatments that can give them hope and relief.

Today is World Epilepsy Day. If somebody from the Epilepsy Foundation or similar organisation approaches you for a donation to fund research, please give.

Greg.

The Enquiring Mind

I believe that we can learn a lot, even from the most mundane things, if we adopt an enquiring attitude and seek to satisfy our curiosity.

Take the cufflinks in this picture.

I found these in a charity shop. They were old-looking and grimy. To the naked eye, the design looked like a compass rose. I liked this design, so I bought them.

A look under better light revealed detail I had not seen in the shop. Hallmarks - and a much clearer look at the design. It was no compass rose, that's for sure, but what was it?

I knew that the 925 mark denoted sterling silver, which was good news for me. But what was that other mark?

Marshaling what little I knew on the subject, I reasoned that hexagonal shapes were common in the Art Deco era. Egyptology was also big in that period, inspired by the US tour of Tutankhamun's treasures. (I owe that fragment of knowledge to the National Gallery of Victoria's splendid Art Deco exhibition, BTW).

My magnifying glass revealed the strange mark on the back to be the number 38. Aha! So, I had found a pair of sterling silver cufflinks from the Art Deco period, probably made in 1938, with an Egyptian design. Very satisfying - my enquiring mind had found all that out in just a couple of hours. A job well done.

Except, that I was wrong, wrong, wrong.

The image continued to intrigue me, and I kept looking at it. What were those lozenge shapes arranged in a circle? And why did this design not contain anything that looked as if it was inspired by 1930s Egyptology? I had come to a dead end.

If we maintain our curiosity, inspiration can come from the unlikeliest quarters. Social media, with its vast cross-section of contributors, can be the source of much information that we might never have sought actively.

I published a photo of these links on a forum I'm a member of and, as a side note, asked if anyone could tell what the image was. I had my answer almost straight away. It's a representation of the Mayan calendar. Looking again, you can see that the design does look more South American than Egyptian. The figure in the centre could well be the god Quetzlcoatl. So, silver Art Deco links with a Mayan design, not Egyptian. It seemed to make sense.

Except - I was still wrong.

Long after I put this inquiry to rest, I gave these links a polish. I had been researching Mexican hallmarks  online, after buying a set of sllver Mexican cufflinks. I'd been looking at lots of hallmark pictures, and something occurred to me. The "38" mark was actually inset in a defined shape, unlike the 925 mark, which was just numbers. The rough outline of this shape was something like an eagle.

Mexican silver is often hallmarked with a device known as a silver eagle. The shape of the eagle has changed over time, but my links definitely have the eagle shape that dates to the period 1948-1970. The 38 indicates the city it was made in and the number of a registered designer, not the date. The number "3" indicates the renowned silver centre of Taxco.

A bit more of a dig turned up that the number 38 was possibly one of a number of designers, including  one of Mexico's most famed silversmiths, Antonio Pineda.

So, a piece of Mexican silver jewellery made in Taxco between 1948 and 1970, by one of a handful of Mexican silversmiths, including one of the most famous of them all.

Not Art Deco, not an Egyptian design, and not made in 1938. Well, at least I had got the sterling silver right, although that was the obvious bit.

The lesson I draw from this is that we should not assume that we have the answers, even when we have done our homework. If we maintain our curiosity and remain open to new information we can learn things that, while they may force us to abandon cherished ideas, can lead us to richer knowledge and take us in surprising new directions.

Much of our social dialogue today consists of setting forth our entrenched views without being open to persuasion by others. How much better would public debate be if we just maintained our curiosity about what others think, and remained open to modifying our preconceptions based on what we hear.

Greg.