The Car That Didn't Go

I don’t have too many vivid memories of childhood1, but I do remember one day in primary school. We had been given a project to make a small wheeled vehicle, and we were out testing them on the netball court. It was a sunny day, warm and hot.

My car was a mash of Construx and ice-cream cartons2, while Scott’s was a constructed kit affair with a proper motor and gearing. Mine had a huge power block with D batteries and not a single gear in sight. It had worked fine in testing. But testing was my table back home, not the tarmac of the court.

It started, it spluttered, it threw off the belt I had liberated from one of the many video recorders my Dad had let me disassemble. It sat on the court while Scott’s fancy car zipped away in the distance.

The lesson here is not, surprisingly: learn about gearing, or that the rich kid will almost always win, but that if you’re wearing a jumper on a hot summer’s day and you’re still freezing, you might be ill. And so, defeated, I laid back on the grass and shivered until my Mum came to pick me up.

I did build a computer this weekend. It works. My first build since…2006 or so (and even then, that was just replacing a blown motherboard. This is likely my first totally new tower since before UNC…and let’s not count up those years!). I can’t really do anything fancy with it until I buy the graphics card in a month or two, but it’s coming along.

Success, then…but I am still under a blanket, shivering, having difficulty standing up or sitting down without pain, and oh, yes, almost managing to give myself third-degree burns whilst attempting to carry a Lemsip. Perhaps I shouldn’t be left alone. Maybe I’ve become allergic to Durham! Maybe I’m just sick.

Still, a week tomorrow, my family arrives and I have my citizenship interview. So probably need to get better.


  1. Ask me about Covent Garden, and I’ll do my party piece about how I was abandoned in the middle of London at three years old and left to fend for myself amongst a carny of street performers, armed only with an inflatable hammer but also afflicted with an early adherence to pacifism. My parents may chime in with ‘we were getting ice-cream! You said you didn’t want any! What child doesn’t want ice-cream?’, but I don’t think that alleviates them of guilt, do you, dear reader? [return]
  2. Look, eventually I started liking ice-cream, okay? NOT THAT I DON’T RELIVE THE TRAUMA WITH EVERY SPOON. [return]