As proud new owners of our first car, a venerable Morris Minor 1000, my wife and I bought an owner’s manual so that we could look after it properly. The manual was one of a series published by the Sunday Times. It was in its third edition, so it must have sold well. It was dated 1965. Here is what it advised us to do by way of routine, daily maintenance:
DAILY: Check oil level, radiator, petrol, tyres and lights.
Now, it wasn’t at all clear what was meant by the word ‘check’. Checking the oil level, radiator and petrol, we thought, was pretty straight forward. Messy, admittedly, but you knew what to do. But we never did find out exactly what to check the lights for. We guessed that you really had to make sure that they all worked but hoped that it would sometimes be OK just to check that none were missing.
The thing that kept me lying awake at night puzzling over was the daily tyre check. We had discovered from elsewhere in the manual that the enemy was embedded stones. And the problem, of course, was that at any particular time three quarters of the tread of the tyres was either resting on the ground or hidden inside the wheel arches.
So I would imagine myself rolling the car forward exactly a quarter of a wheel circumference, jumping out and rushing around with my penknife flicking out the pebbles. Then I would jump in again and repeat the process. Then I would repeat it again. And then I would repeat it again. Provided, of course, that I had left room to roll the car far enough forward.
To ease this preliminary to each day I tried to imagine more efficient methods, for example getting the car to roll forwards (slowly, mind you) by itself, while I trotted alongside doing my checking and flicking, but they all seemed to have unhappy outcomes. It was a very worrying problem.
You can probably guess the admission I am about to make. It wasn’t just that we didn’t do this routine maintenance on our precious car every day. It was much worse than that. We didn’t do it at all. And worse still, we got away with it!
Somehow (unless we just didn’t notice) whatever it was that checking tyres for embedded stones was designed to prevent, didn’t happen. I never did find out what it would have been if it had. But I still feel a little bit guilty about it. To this day I sometimes reach down and flick a stone out of the tread of a tyre as a sort of gesture to the car that I do, really, know how to look after it properly.
We still have that old manual as a souvenir; it is a good example of what happens when a specialist, in this case a motoring freak, gives advice to generalists (real people). Nobody in their right mind would think for a moment that the writer ever seriously intended his readers to carry out such daily checks. Much more likely he thought that it would be expected of him to give that sort of advice when writing a manual. That, after all, is what manuals are for.
To be charitable, he probably thought that he ought to say what he thought motorists ought to do — in an ideal world.
James Willis, general practitioner
gummygunk
origamiaround
turnnoffyourmind
2087
germansingergirl
stormborns
discoholicmusic