Please, Lord, give me a sign!

Why do oldies indicate – and young idiots in Range Rovers fail to?

matthew norman

Identifying the precise moment when the country’s regression towards developing-world status started is beyond me – and possibly beyond those far cleverer than me (not, admittedly, the highest of bars).

But I have the nagging sense that this downward trajectory, which barely perceptibly began aeons before Brexit and has accelerated into a corkscrew spin, started when motorists came to regard the deployment of indicators as beneath their dignity.

The theory will lack strong support from both the relatively sane and left-leaning historians. The latter would doubtless look elsewhere for the genesis of our national collapse. To that time some decades ago, for example, when the idea that the desires of shareholders morally outranks the needs of workers completed its journey from the crazier outreaches of the far-right think tank to the epicentre of mainstream orthodoxy.

Who can say which of us is closer to the truth? But this I state with confidence: the precipitous decline in vehicular indication is a metaphor for that of the United Kingdom itself.

It is also one of those affronts that should concern the proctologist. It is a searing, shooting, debilitating pain up the rear – and not on one level, missus, but two.

For cyclists, God spare their bones, there is a trivial third level. A friend reports very nearly being propelled into the next life on a London street recently by a Range Rover (what else?) whose driver deemed warning of an imminent left turn unnecessary.

I do not propose to get bogged down here and now by the matter of outsize cars in urban environments. That can wait. Suffice it today to observe this. If an ailing motor-manufacturing industry wants to revive itself, it should fiercely lobby what passes for the government for (a) the mandatory inclusion of sidewinder missiles in all correctly sized cars; and (b) legislation guaranteeing impunity to anyone who uses such weaponry to remove a 4x4 from this planet.

For god-fearing motorists whose lives are not endangered by non-indication, however, those two levels are these. First, the requisite arrogance and/or indolence is massively irritating. And secondly, awareness of the golf-clubbore prissiness required to be irritated by it induces pangs of self-disgust barely less acute than the loathing for those who cannot summon the energy to depress a plastic lever by a couple of inches.

Before we plough any deeper into this treacly abyss, a word of reassurance. There won’t be more than a very few of you reading these words (on reflection, that could be almost the entire audience) who are regularly guilty of this offence.

It is at least partly a generational thing. My mother, for example, reports never once having failed to indicate in a 63-year career at the wheel. On the other hand, in that so-called rival publication The Youngie, there may this month be an article railing at the self-righteous pedantry of those who take the trouble.

But the under-50s are notorious dunces, and a smidgeon of their idiocy resides in their wilful refusal to give fellow travellers on His Majesty’s highways a clue about their intentions.

So when did it begin, this mass middle-fingered salute to the laws and niceties of road travel? In the absence of reliable research, we are marooned in the dark once again.

But it is at least 15 years since I first noticed a police car turning a corner without indication.

With hindsight, perhaps I overreacted. Approaching the car on foot from a north-westerly direction when it had the decency to obey a red light, tapping on the window and making the ‘wind it down’ hand-circling gesture was a misjudgement. The teen at the wheel seemed little more amused to hear ‘Excuse me, sir, but are you aware that you just breached the Highway Code?’ than the ensuing warning about his future behaviour.

Whether or not this met the formal criteria for wasting police time, as he brusquely posited, any ambition to perform a citizen’s arrest was abandoned.

In the intervening years, what was then a rarity has become the norm in towns and cities, though not in rural communities. On a visit to my beloved technical wife a fortnight ago (we do not cohabit; the relationship works best with a cordon sanitaire of six counties between us), a motorist screamed at her for an ultra-rare indicating oversight.

In Dorset, and elsewhere, they cleave doughtily to the old ways.

In London, on the other hand, it is now indication and not its absence that has come to seem peculiar. In an age when Chancellors regard paying capital gains tax as beneath their dignity, it seems almost natural that so many feel freed from the compulsion to obey less obviously important rules.

When a government is pathologically incapable of communicating the direction it wants to take, can you really blame countless millions of motorists (not all of them peering smugly down from the seats of urban Range Rovers in the belief that indication is for the little cars) mirroring that?

what was a crocodile?

A line of schoolchildren walking in pairs, shepherded by a couple of teachers front and aft, was once a familiar sight.

Temporarily released from desks to wend their way to a swimming baths, church or educational venue, they’d be chatting along like a flock of chaffinches. And the public, even when shunted by the line off the pavement into the gutter, would adopt an expression of benign tolerance.

We used to call this set-up a crocodile.

I presume the strange nickname came about because of the column’s wavy, sideto-side forward motion, combined with the head-up, shoulders-back posture usually adopted by the leading pair.

The term was only ever used in Britain:

‘Crocodile: a girls’ school walking two and two in a long file, 1870’. (Shorter Oxford Dictionary)

Later, the term was extended to lines of adults and vehicles, and the crocodile became a popular means of moving primary school children around.

‘You are representing your school!’ exhorted our senior mistress, back in the early 1960s, running her beady eye over the length of our skirts and angle of our hats and ties, before releasing us into the glaring spotlight of the public stage.

‘Remember to comport yourselves with dignity!’

Things hadn’t changed much since Tirzah Garwood made her delightful woodcut called Crocodile (pictured), back in 1929. She captured the deep-rooted yet lightly flaunted pride in school and uniform, combined with a gleeful sort of insouciance; the awareness that, despite the ‘beetle-crushers’ on their feet and identical felt hats rammed on their heads, the girls nevertheless had little ways and means of asserting individuality.

From the end of the 19th century, showmen such as George Edwardes (Gaiety Girls) and John Tiller (Tiller Girls) had recognised the captivating charm radiated by crocodiles of ‘pert’ – but respectable – schoolgirls, ‘full of girlish glee’. They encouraged their chorus girls to attract publicity by emulating them in public.

In Paris in the 1930s, Miss Bluebell ruled that her Bluebell Girls, chosen for their height and elegance, must always walk to the Folies Bergère in English-schoolgirl crocodile formation. Impeccably dressed in hat, gloves and unladdered stockings, they must convey the impression that, should they get run over, their underwear would bear inspection. Furthermore, they must never, ever be seen snacking in the street. Needless to say, Parisian necks craned, horns honked, brakes squealed…

Nowadays, schoolchildren tend to be bussed between venues and are only occasionally seen walking in a crocodile. We might catch sight of a line of primaryschool children wearing high-vis vests, but this is referred to as a ‘walking bus’.

My grandchildren talk of sometimes walking with a ‘talk partner’. Chaffinchlike chatter still carries on, but the word ‘crocodile’ draws a blank.

And when even a primary-school teacher on Mumsnet claims never to have heard of the crocodile, I guess the term may now quietly be heading towards extinction.

A pity, because it was colourful and fun.

Eleanor Allen

what is manifestation?

Manifestation is when you want something so much that you actually make it happen. Say, you want to be 20 per cent richer. Or to achieve a firmer bum.

‘Whatever you believe you can have, YOU CAN HAVE!’ insists the so-called Queen of Manifesting, Kelly Walker, who has manifested her way to a $20,000-a-month career as a life coach.

‘Trust the universe!’ counsels Roxie Nafousi, 27, the beautiful, successful, well-connected, independently wealthy author of Manifest: 7 Steps to Living Your Best Life. According to the strange circular logic of manifestation, she manifested her own bestselling status.

Indeed, so manifest are the powers of manifestation – there are 27 billion videos with the #manifestation hashtag on TikTok – it may seem surprising that no one manifested this miraculous discovery before.

But, as with so many phenomena in our amnesiac age, manifesting has been around for years. It was the eponymous disclosure of Rhonda Byrne’s 2006 book, The Secret, which sold 30 million copies. ‘If you want abundance, if you want prosperity, then focus on abundance. Focus on prosperity,’ Byrne told her readers. ‘Food cannot cause you to put on weight, unless you think it can.’ Byrne was drawing on the ideas of 19th-century American mesmerist Phineas Quimby, who claimed to have cured his own tuberculosis by thinking happy thoughts.

Now, try as I might, I cannot seem to manifest the data from any double-blind randomised control trials to prove that you can indeed cure disease in this manner. But psychologists will concede that there is a certain logic behind some of the strategies recommended by manifestation gurus. Precommitment, for example.

Say, you want to lose weight. I mean, literally, say it: to yourself, your family and all your Facebook friends. A range of reputable studies have shown that you are indeed more likely to lose weight if you do this – since you are making your future self more accountable. Likewise, if you want to learn Spanish, it’s a good idea to sign up to Spanish lessons, set your phone to Spanish, book a trip to Spain and so on.

But it doesn’t take a genius to work out why, in times of uncertainty and disillusion, there might be a ready market for the idea that all you need to turn your miserable life around is positive thinking (and to sign up for this $10,000 online course).

I would recommend Barbara Ehrenreich’s Smile or Die (2010), written while the author was recovering from cancer, as a once-and-for-all antidote. ‘The question is why one should be so inwardly preoccupied at all,’ Ehrenreich writes. ‘Why not reach out to others in love and solidarity or peer into the natural world for some glimmer of understanding? Why spend so much time working on oneself when there is so much real work to be done?’

Richard Godwin