NOTES ON A SMALL CITY

Richard Wyatt: Notes on a small city

Columnist Richard Wyatt embraces the new year by going back 50 years to 1972 when the first hand-held calculator went on sale. Things have changed a bit since then, he muses...

Iam guessing that by now all the Christmas-gifted smart phones, video games and virtual assistant devices have been well and truly run-in? The use of the phrasal verb ‘run-in’ dates me of course, for those who have no idea what I am talking about.

To run something in is to use something new in such a way as not to make maximum demands on it. In the good old days the engine of a new car had to be run in gently for the first one thousand miles. Such care I believe is no longer necessary. Straight off the production line this four-wheeled, engineering and electronic marvel is fit to go. Though, it has to be said, the days of putting your foot down on the open road are way behind us.

Of course none of the above mentioned devices need gentle handling. Each will instantly connect you with the world –real or imagined –at the press of a key or the sound of your voice. How soon does the sense of the new and wonderful mellow into the sense of the ordinary and everyday.

During an idle moment recently I looked back 50 years to 1972 –not a good year in terms of the tragic loss of human life, including the deaths of civil rights marchers in Bloody Sunday in Northern Ireland and the massacre of Israeli athletes at the Munich Olympics. And overshadowing all of this was the Vietnam War. However, I was revisiting the year to search for technology and the first stirrings of our modern world of instant communication. In January of that year the first hand-held calculator went on sale. It was a case of hello HP 35 and goodbye slide rule. A year earlier an American called John Blankenbaker invented the world’s first commercially available personal computer in his Californian garage. It came to the market five years before Apple 1 but, sadly, who remembers the Kenbak 1?

Another interesting fact from that year is that it was with the 1972 model that the VW Beetle overtook Ford’s famous Model T as the world’s all-time, most-produced automobile. The Beetle was unlike any other vehicle for much of its 65 years. No car, aside from the Model T, was more instantly recognisable.

I never owned one. My first car was a Ford Anglia, quickly followed by a two-tone cactus green Triumph Herald which I almost overturned whilst skidding on an ice patch. I slid down a grassy slope and remember local Weston Mercury photographer Ted Amesbury being on hand to help me out. My pride was more dented than the car, as it happened, and I did find a cherished pen I thought I had lost. It popped out of whatever metal crevice it had fallen into when the car came to rest.

Hand on heart, was I ever really into cars? My grandmother provided the cash for an Austin Healey Sprite, complete with wire wheels, that I proudly drove up and down to Brighton where I was working in BBC local radio. She made me pay every penny back too, and I was grateful she showed me the value of money. Bless her –she didn’t charge me interest.

The car I was most proud of at the time was a red Ford Escort XR3 which was parked proudly outside my Clifton flat in Bristol. I still remember the shock I experienced the morning I opened the front door to find the car without its wheels and balanced on bricks!

Did I ever have a real affection for a car? There was the little blue soft-topped Suzuki jeep we took to Ireland on the Fishguard to Rosslare ferry and criss-crossed the Emerald Isle one gorgeous week in spring. On impulse I later traded it in for a Land Rover Discovery so I could sit above the surrounding low-slung traffic. I am still being reprimanded for my lapse of judgement by my husband. Our current little motor won’t get us any faster around Bath’s traffic-clogged roads, but it’s a gem when it comes to parking.

We’re lucky to live close enough to town to walk or cycle for a lot of the time though and at my age my bike is electric. As the next car will be when we trade this one in.

Here is a picture of me seated on the sort of horse power of which my gymkhana-mad grandfather would have approved.

Giddy up –here comes 2022. Happy New Year! n

There was the little blue soft-topped Suzuki jeep we took to Ireland ... and criss-crossed the Emerald Isle one gorgeous week in spring ❝