Last night, Meg and I had a much better night’s sleep which was very welcome to us both after the disturbed night’s sleep that we had the night before. Today is going to be a departure from our normal Tuesday routine as I have to attend an annual medical monitoring in my local doctor’s surgery. I have had to arrange with the care agency that the normal ‘sit’ arrangement we have with Meg on a Tuesday be advanced so that I can keep my appointment. The same thing will have to be done next week when there is a follow up appointment to discuss the results. Today is rather a wet and miserable day so I am not too unhappy that we are having to change the normal rhythm of our routine. But if the weather brightens up this afternoon, there is always the park to which I can take us both so that we have a breath of fresh air in our lungs.
After the reminiscences of my childhood, I started to think about some of the activities that engaged me when I was aged about 9-11. The family had moved to a very small village in Yorkshire outside Harrogate and the village as a whole was only 200+ souls so naturally all of the children knew each other. One activity which we did together was the construction of what we called go-carts (the American version is go-Kart and was motorised) This venture was started off by going to the local municipal tip which in those days anyone could wander around. The essential component was a discarded pram from which one could wrench off the wheels, preferably with the axle intact. Once having got these home, construction could start in earnest. One started off with planks of wood that were somewhere nailed or screwed together and then one longer and narrower projected piece rather like the vertical part of a ‘T’ Onto this we affixed a cross-bar onto which were screwed one set of wheels and evidently this had to be steerable. From somewhere we acquired a bolt which had to affix the cross member to the chassis but where young boys with access to only the most rudimentary of hand tools could make a hole large enough to receive the bolt. The other village boys taught me the skills and this is what we did. First a nail was hammered in slightly and then removed – into the hole left by the nail we screwed in a small screw to be replaced by a somewhat larger one. Eventually the hole was made the right size by making the poker used to poke the coal fire red hot (this was 1955!) and then running downstairs with it to plunge it into the hole in the cross member to make it the right size. To the cross member, one attached some stout string (in fact, in the fields of a rural community one often found baling twine) and this provided the steering mechanism. If you were really fortunate in finding a fifth wheel, this could always be utilised as a real steering wheel with the twine wrapped around the wheel and held in place by a tyre. Almost finally, one persuaded one’s mother to let you have some spare remnants of carpet and this was then tacked into place to provide a degree of comfort and to save one from splinters in the wood. As a final finishing touch, in the Yorkshire village we used to visit the yard of the village pub and find some discarded crown corks that could then be tacked into place to provide for a degree of decoration. To drive one’s go-cart, one generally knelt on it using the spare leg to kick the card into motion and then finally lie flat on it, particularly if one was fortunate enough to have a degree of slope in one’s local road down which you could travel. Brakes were generally frowned upon but of course the toes of shoes often served this purpose. One achieved a degree of street credibility if having whooshed down the slope of one’s local road or pavement there was a natural ginnel or opening in which one could steer one’s craft. As I remember it, girls and younger children were allowed to sit on the go-cart as passengers but they were not generally involved in the construction process ‘per se’ Naturally, one was always falling off and crashes were frequent so there were always running repairs to be undertaken. Having had this experience when I was young, when my son was of the appropriate age and living in Leicestershire, I built a go-cart for my son built upon the tried and tested principles. The other lads and dads in the immediate vicinity thought this was a great idea so I had inadvertently started a trend. The fathers generally looked on indulgently and evidently lent their sons some hand tools (it was the age before electric screwdrivers and the like) and they generally let their sons get on with their construction jobs, probably quite happy for them to learn construction skills on their own and to teach and occasionally help each other. In case my recollections seem excessively romantic, I did go on the internet to see how far my recollections were rooted in reality. Everything I remembered was documented on the web and I think that the go-cart construction thing was a 1950’s-1960’s thing as there was less traffic on the roads/pavements, pram wheels were easier to come by and the commercial ethic of the 1970’s and 1980’s had yet to take a hold. Incidentally, what I have termed ‘go-carts’ were known by the local name of ‘trollies’ in Leicestershire and my welsh neighbour with whom I discussed this subject at one time called them ‘gambos’ which I have found out is the traditional Welsh word for a farm cart.
Ukraine has put Vladimir Putin ‘into a position he never dreamt in his worst nightmares’, former foreign secretary Sir Malcolm Rifkind has told Sky News. But there is a report in the news media that the Russians were totally unprepared for the Ukrainian counter offensive and the elite Ukrainian troops were met by conscripts whose officers just ran away. This last sentiment has more than a hint of Western propaganda about it but there is probably a germ of truth in it. The move by Ukraine was a massive gamble and very risky but seems to have paid off not least in the propaganda war. The story is told in the early days of the war that the Ukrainians took their young captive conscript soldiers into custody, gave each of them a cheap mobile phone and told them to phone their mothers to tell the truth about where they were and what they were doing. This was an excellent propaganda move at the time given the misinformation that the Russian authorities were feeding their population.
© Mike Hart [2024]