David Penberthy: Maybe we should all stay indoors, safe from Covid, old cars and ham sandwiches

This week long-suffering parents of Australia discovered we basically hate our kids and want them to die if we feed them the odd slice of ham, writes David Penberthy.

In what might be an early sign of mental illness, I’ve spent a fair bit of time this week thinking about two things. Ham sandwiches and modern car design.

I got a new car last year. Worst decision I ever made. There is nothing wrong with the car. It is a good car. Comfortable, mechanically sound, cheap to run and easy to drive. I won’t say what type of car it is, because the people who sold it to me are very nice and reputable, and I don’t want to damage their brand or reputation. All I will say is that it is a brand new, entry-level, non-luxury car made by one of the major car manufacturers.

The key problems with the car are twofold. The first is that it’s not my old Hilux, which is the car I traded in to get this one. Oh Hilux how I miss thee. A hunking, scratched, crap-filled, no-bulls--t beast of a thing, swapped in a moment of madness for a seven-seat family mover, a transition which in an instant makes you go from looking like a knockabout frontiersman to Clark W. Griswald. They should have thrown in a free vasectomy and a pair of walk socks.

The real problem with the car is not peculiar to this car but endemic to all new modern cars. My stupid new car has about 48 different safety features, most of which I don’t know how to turn off. It’s as if at some point the people who make cars handed the design process to your irrational and elderly great aunt who spends most of her time spraying the house with Glen 20 and shouting at the children not to injure themselves playing in the yard. The car is a dinging, bleeping testament to the modern capacity for paranoia.

School children living dangerously. Picture: Istock

Open the door and it starts beeping to tell you that the door is open. Drive more than 2m at barely 5km an hour, even moving the car in the driveway, and it starts binging at you to put your seatbelt on. Same too if you dare place anything weightier than a 2 litre carton of milk on the passenger seat. Even a humble slab of VB needs its belt on for the ride home from the drive through these days. I suppose at fifty bucks a slab you wouldn’t want a single one of those green stubbies to do themselves a mischief.

Then there’s parking assist, which starts shrieking at you like a banshee when you get within about 2m of anything you intend to park near.

From a crowded field, the daftest of all these safety features must be lane assist. Lane assist? I don’t want to sound cocky but at the age of 52 and after more than three decades of driving, I have become reasonably good at keeping the car within the generously-proportioned white lines that adorn every Australian road. It’s the one safety feature I have managed to turn off, mercifully, meaning I can now make approach hills driving without the steering wheel vibrating like a bass amp, every time I (rightly) straddle or touch a line while going through curves or passing a peloton of cyclists.

Anyway, to ham sandwiches. This week, in a stunning display of mission creep, we saw the Cancer Council go to war with the long-suffering parents of Australia by declaring that we basically hate our kids and want them to die if we dare feed them the occasional slice of ham. In a heartening sign that common sense still prevails and people know a bunch of nanny state wowsers when they see them, the mainstream reaction to this edict was: “Oh, shut up”. It’s not as if parents don’t have enough guilt trips laid on them already without adding this one to the mix, with a product that’s been part of a balanced and varied diet for centuries now being hailed as the sure-fire path to a colostomy bag.

It’s my hunch that with the success of slip slop slap and the proliferation of corpse photographs on cigarette packets, the Cancer Council’s latest pronouncement may merely be the health lobby’s equivalent of the devil finding work for idle hands to do.

There are far more harmful habits than ham. Picture: iStock

It certainly has no basis in science, unless of course by science you mean a study of people who ate nothing but a kilo of ham a week and paid the ultimate price.

Pinging cars and ham sandwiches of death are the micro-level manifestation of all the gradual intrusions into our lives made by those who worry too much. Clearly I am not harking for a day when cars were made of solid metal, had no air bags, and seatbelts did not exist. Nor I am advocating that we fill our kids’ lunch boxes with Lolly Gobble Bliss Bombs, Fanta and a KFC Double Down Burger every day. But at some point society has gone from reckless in the extreme to paranoid beyond belief.

Cars used to be about freedom and eating used to be about enjoyment. What was it Bruce Springsteen said again in Born to Run? Just wrap your legs round these velvet rims and strap your hands ’cross my engine. Crazy talk. The Boss is probably a ham enthusiast, too.

I have seen po-faced people tweeting in the past weeks that maybe China has got the right idea with its eradication strategy and that Australia is being too hasty in removing masks and social distancing rules. Maybe they have a point. Maybe we should all stay indoors where we are safe from Covid, old-model cars and ham sandwiches. Or maybe the car manufacturers should get together with the Cancer Council and make a car that has an alarm that goes off if you enter it while eating a ham sandwich. All I know is that when it comes to safety, you can’t be too careful.