The first Breakdown of the Day
Communication matters. This was it. This was dinosaur day. A trip up the A34 to Oxford to the Museum of Natural History. Mostly to indulge my three-year-old’s current mega obsession with all things prehistoric and lizard-like but also to find a renowned cake shop. Driving in near cruise-control (only our family car doesn’t have that function) and watching the misty fields pass by, the journey was going well. I wondered if this would be one of our more successful days out. Suddenly, a dashboard light started blinking, a large orange error message popped up:
Engine Malfunction – Service Now
We pulled over to a layby and I rang the AA. The young ones started protesting. The call handler took me through all the steps to get a help vehicle out to me before my other half called out “But is it safe to drive?!”. The intention was clear, we couldn’t wait the forecast two hours for the responder, especially if they would only advise us to get the engine serviced.
The call handler put us through to a technician who set about diagnosing how serious the issue we might have was. All credit to him he was very calm. He had good communication skills. He must have been used to talking to highly stressed drivers, close to very fast moving vehicles, as we were.
Most likely one of the sensors in the exhaust system he said. MOT failure-causing he said. Well, that was fine. We weren’t headed to this historic city for the car’s annual road worthiness certification. I turned the ignition back on, revved the engine to check it wasn’t about to stall or combust, and drove all the way to Oxford without issue.
Timelessness and Remembering
Looking at dinosaur skeletons is on the one hand awe-inspiring and exciting, and the other a little humbling. My son loved it, running everywhere, posing with the relics from before time, and naming them all correctly despite not being able to read yet. If you are anything like as reflective as I am, the sight of a set of huge, beyond-ancient skeletons may start you thinking about timelessness. This was the case today as I attempted to shepherd my young family round the displays of fossils and constructed dinosaur bones.
I felt small in an existential sense, localised and time-bound. In recent weeks I have decided to attempt to live a nice old long life. Ninety years in fact. There’s a lot that can be achieved in ninety years of living. A lot of good that can be done if one is so inclined and remains healthy. However, it pales into insignificance on a long enough timeline.
An almost absurd thought crossed my mind. I thought that a post-human society of beings living after the pending eco-apocalypse might dig up my remains and put me in a space museum orbiting Mars. Funny to think in thousands of years my skeleton could be displayed in a cabinet – “Earth Man”. Even if I spent my life doing good things the caption might read “Earth Man was an ignorant species that flourished on the Blue Planet for a short span of time before superheating the ecosystems he depended on for life”.
Communication in Stone
I noticed something else that got me thinking. More pertinent than the exhibition in my mind were the statues surrounding the hall. They adorned the walls and corners, looking inward on the displays. All prominent scholars, physicians and curators from Oxford’s illustrious past. I guessed it would have been a mark of honour and great respect to have one’s bust or figure carved in stone inside that museum.
Statues have come to prominence in recent times for a variety of reasons. Most notably whether we should keep statues of controversial figures. It’s not a debate I intend to comprehensively address here. However, I thought the static onlookers to the central hall of the museum were mildly grotesque. Each had a plaque – given a name and position and likeness, as a point of veneration for the masses to see. It seemed to be arrogance and elitism encoded in rockwork.
As we left and made our way through the city centre by foot I saw that Oxford has something of a love affair with statues. There seem to be more busts, figures and likenesses staring blankly into eternity from pillars and columns than there are living people walking the streets (admittedly it was a starkly cold and dreary day). What a place. All these stone somebodies will be glad of the high levels of protection the current Conservative government has granted them in the name of ‘culture’.
Communication Breakdown
After a tasty but pricey lunch in a local eatery, we went on the hunt for a fantastically well-rated cake shop. The only problem was we went down an alley and ended up in the midst of a high street with throngs of people pushing past. It was noisy and busy. If all of the side streets had been deserted, it was perhaps because the crowds had come to this central location. For of all things, a protest. XR banners flew everywhere. Protesters handed out flyers, and a samba band played as its members danced and swayed.
As a side note I quite liked the loud drums but we suddenly realised we were going the wrong way to this cake shop. I couldn’t hear what my wife was telling me, and I have no faith in her sense of direction. Her face was puzzled. She was spinning her phone around and around trying to get the blue point to align with the dotted line. I tried to identify a landmark and explain what direction we should be taking but she couldn’t make out the words. A mini communication crisis. It was frustrating to say the least.
Eventually she got fed up and strode off in a potentially random direction. I said a quick prayer to whatever force is in charge of compass points on phones, and dragging the children, followed after. A fair few hurried steps and two right turns later, we found a road I had accidentally driven on earlier when looking for parking. This we recognized as round the corner (just one more) from our destination. What a relief.
A not so quick journey home
Oxford is not a city for cars. This was just one of my takeaways from the outing. As we left the city centre gorging on cake, the satnav’s line went from blue to orange to red. Plus five minutes on our route, then plus ten. Eventually we sat near-stationary for twenty minutes.
Strangely cake doesn’t taste as good when you are stuck in endless traffic. The only slight consolation was watching even more gridlocked traffic trying to get into the city whilst we were finally moving out. If I had some kind of communication channel to all incoming drivers, I would have let them know not to bother. By mid-afternoon on a Saturday, Oxford is full.
My enduring message from the day was the power of positive thinking. I’ve focused on the negatives in this blog post but all things considered it was a good day. I found some food for thought, the kids enjoyed the dinosaurs, lunch was enjoyable and overall I was reminded once again that the automobile is not the solution to the world’s transport problems.