Not that much of a tall order nowadays, as this can quite easily be achieved through sheer carelessness. Modern cars can touch a hundred at the involuntary twitch of a right knee.
But 'toning up' used to be something to brag about, like losing your virginity. The needle nudging up to 100 used to be so scary it made you wobble your steering wheel in disbelief.
These days 130 is probably the target; that, I think, is progress for you.
It was different in Aldous Huxley's day: traveling in a car at 60mph had such an inebriating effect on him that he declared speed 'a new type of drug… an efficient and less harmful substitute for alcohol and cocaine'. Ah, Aldous, you poor fool, on this as on so many things: totally wrong. Never mind the 'less harmful' bit, nothing is ever a substitute for alcohol. It just joins it in the mix, as the hundreds of thousands of people, whose lives have been ruined by drunk drivers since Huxley wrote those words, will testify.
However, it is true there is something intoxicating about a minor infringement of the law, like breaking a speed limit, which makes you feel outrageous for a moment. There's a wonderful scene in the shit-but-still-watchable Roger Moore film, The Man Who Haunted Himself. Roger, an uptight city gent, is on his regular 30mph drive home to Weybridge when he gets a funny look in his eye. The famous eyebrow goes up and the foot goes down. Soon, Rog is doing seventy and appears to be morphing into a different person, and the eyebrow keeps ascending as he accelerates until he smashes his Rover 3-litre into some road works. The car disintegrates, his soul divides in two and another version of himself, more wild and daring and exciting than his old one, usurps his job, wife, house and family. Come on, it could happen. Somewhere out there could be another version of Richard Hammond who says to Jeremy Clarkson, 'piss off, it's your turn to drive the rocket'.
With today's cars, as any incarnation of Richard Hammond will tell you, how fast they go is not an issue, it's how resistant they are to flipping over and breaking up, like Roger Moore's 3-litre. But what is so appealing to humans about speed? Why is it like a drug? Why are we programmed to want to go faster?
I suppose it must have been good news for turnip delivery man in, say, 1930 when he discovered he could get his turnips from Grantham to King's Lynn in less than a week, thanks to his new-fangled motor van. But when sugar-beet man overtook turnip man in his brand new Root Vegetable Van mark II, the envy kicked in.
The problem with speed is that, technology being as it is, someone will always go faster than you. It's a metaphor for the whole of this book. What motivates people to cram their lives full of ever more amazing experiences is their all-consuming desire to have a richer life than anyone else they know. But the law of progress means there will always be a quicker way of doing something around the corner. look at one of the greatest labour-saving devices ever — the lift, or elevator, if this book should turn up in an American remainder bin.
Imagine a box you can walk into that will lift you hundreds of feet in the air to save you walking up some stairs! Even with such time-saving devices as lifts people cannot bear to wait an extra second. Otis Elevators employ dedicated experts in the field of time delays and waiting experiences — they have discovered that even a three-second 'door-dwell' (delay between pressing the door-close button and the doors actually closing) can be too much for some. There is so much unnecessary pressing of the door-close button in Japan and South Korea that building managers have, unbeknownst to the passengers, disabled the door-close function, so its users are pressing it for nothing. They leave the redundant button in place because pressing it makes people feel better.
I used to own a 2CV — a masterpiece of French design. Its size and shape was dictated by the brief to transport a hat-wearing farmer together with his wife and a tray of eggs across a ploughed field. Suffice to say I loved everything about it, especially when heavy motorway traffic allowed me to trundle past various high-performance cars stuck in the outside lane. Very few things have given me greater pleasure than the look on the Porsche driver's face as I crawled by his window.
Unfortunately there must have been another element in the design brief of the 2CV which ensures it rusts through and breaks in half after five years. So now I have a bicycle and, believe me, the effect on other drivers is just the same, if not better than the 2CV. The added beauty being not only can a bike freewheel past slow-moving traffic, it can jump red lights, go the wrong way down one-way streets, cut in front of buses and ride on pavements. Car drivers often rather stupidly ask, why is it that cyclists always jump red light? The answer is simple: because we can and you can't. Your anger brings us joy.
Fortunately, there is now a 'slow movement' afoot in Europe; it rejects haste and impatience and over-stimulation. It began in Italy and has now established a set of conditions (a bit like those for joining the Euro) that towns and cities must fulfill if they want to join. Appropriately, Ludlow in Shropshire and Diss in Norfolk are already in. Why not lobby for your town to join today?
Richard Wilson, in Can't Be Arsed
