Car-free day? Stuff that, I’m off

Like Thelma and Louise, I’ll keep going.

Normally at this time of year I’d be sulking at work, my summer holiday over just as I began to feel relaxed. But not in 2023, since the brightest of the group we’ve been travelling with for a couple of decades spotted a financial opportunity.

“Why are we going away in school holidays,” Leanne asked, “when all our kids left school years ago?” The “kids”, now in their 20s, still come with us, happy to endure the mocking envy of those whose youth evaporated long ago, in exchange for free food and grog. But now we’re only paying half price for our rental houses, it’s double the delight to accommodate them and their friends.

So as this edition of the paper lands in the vicinity of your driveway, I will be tootling up the Pacific Highway like Mr Toad towards the Northern Rivers of NSW, in my partly electric car. The electric bits are primarily the lights, windows and windscreen wipers, their spotlessly clean energy generated by a 2.5L V6 turbo engine.

It’s but a modest sacrifice to the high priests of the Church of Capricious Climate, I know, but we need our gestures to distract China from building another dozen coal-fired power stations by Tuesday, or however this business is supposed to work.

Our first refuelling stop is usually at Taree, where an abundance of pumps can still see me sitting in high season behind a couple of other vehicles. I pass the five minutes musing on how long I’d be waiting if I were in a fully electric car, with all the thousands who got up earlier than me spending half an hour plugged in before limping anxiously to the next functioning charging point.

And while the government will one day turn off all the petrol pumps and make me buy an EV, because it is their singular talent to destroy our quality of life with idiotic decisions (don’t worry, not writing about the pandemic response when I’m on my hols), I console myself that until then the Congolese toddlers who scratch cobalt out of the dead African soil will have a little less work to do (although it’s climate enthusiast Greta Thunberg, she insists, who’s having her childhood stolen).

Enough negativity; the joy of having the same bunch of friends at the beach at the same time means every day’s a singing, dancing, well fed and watered party, and I like a party as much as the next man, unless the next man’s Elton John.

Not fancy-dress parties, though. I’ve always found them tedious, an extra chore of costume selection on top of buying presents and feigning bonhomie, so now they’re revealed to be a pointer to the evil in your soul, my instinct is vindicated.

When I was a student, bad-taste parties were hugely popular. In our attempts to out-disgust our fellow guests, people would go to such imaginative extremes that I can’t describe the most memorable outfits in a family newspaper, or even in the Pervert’s Monthly newsletter, if it’s still published.

Suffice to say a Nazi uniform wouldn’t have made the top 10, even embellished with a cartoon German accent — “Ve haff vays off making you talk!” — and preposterous goosestepping. Hardly a ringing endorsement of National Socialism, I would have thought, but we live in a different world today, don’t we? And as for blackface, that’s long been unthinkable, unless perhaps you’re going as Justin Trudeau. I pray I live long enough to find out what garb’s considered cancel-worthily offensive in 25 years’ time. Jacket and tie, I expect.

So a leisurely fortnight at the seaside, then home to learn how my local Lane Cove council has voted on its visionary proposal to have a car-free day in September, to “raise awareness” of climate change. This is a noble and vital cause, as I believe there are still a couple of Yanomami tribesmen in the deep Amazon jungle who aren’t fully across the latest musings from Davos.

As I say, different world, but at least we’re on the right side of history.