tim's experiment

When I was a kid it was customary for people who drove professionally, or wrote in the motoring magazines, to denounce “Sunday drivers” who commuted by public transport during the week and only got their cars out on Sunday. The theory was that these people got less practice, and hence were worse drivers, than those who drove every day.

When you were actually driving, or being driven, the singular characteristic of Sunday drivers was that they were not going fast enough. In retrospect this seems a bit unfair. Some, at least, of the people who aroused my father’s scorn were probably driving slowly to admire the scenery. Still there was probably something in it. When I worked as a taxi driver for a while I did notice an increase, not so much in raw speed but in the ability to get on with it, and in particular to squeeze through gaps which were only jsut big enough for the taxi, with whose size I was of course very familiar.

Anyway in Hong Kong all the Sunday drivers seem to be able to drive at the same speed as everyone else. The thing that shows them up is the parking. On weekdays you generally find that the person parking in front of you can get into a space perpendicular to the road (“L” parking as opposed to the “S” where you finish up parallel to the kerb) at the first attempt, or maybe with one forward movement to adjust his direction. On Sundays the standard plummets. The people you see painfullhy backing and filling in an effort to squeeze a monstrous Merc into a standard parking space are not Sunday drivers in the sense that they use public transport on weekdays. They are Sunday drivers in the sense that they only drive on the chauffeur’s day off.  It seems that nobody in Hong Kong learns to park properly.

I must admit that in this respect I had some underserved luck. Nobody did “L ” parking in the UK when I left. Multi-storey carparks were almost unheard of and you expected to park in the street. When I got my first Hong Kong vehicle, an elderly white van, I worked in Lai Chi Kok and parked on a patch of waste ground which has since become a shopping mall. The ancient gentleman who presided over the waste ground gathered from my early efforts that I was no good at parking and decided very generously to teach me. As we did not have a language in common this was a challenging experience for both of us but I have had no trouble with “L” parking since then.

It seems that people who learn in Hong Kong are not so lucky. I suspect this is because of the universal habit among local driving schools of sticking some extra gadgets on the back of your learner vehicle to help. On vans this usually takes the form of what looks like a set of metal whiskers. On cars they sometimes have a piece of wood. It looks like something Boadicea might have put on her chariot to cut enemies off at the ankle, but of course the purpose of the gadget is to help the student to park and pass. Having passed the test, though, it seems that nobody, but nobody, every bothers to put a set of metal whiskers on the car he rides in every day. So only the professionals learn how to park properly.

Actually, driving is not the only thing Hong Kong people have to do for themselves on Sunday. As I dogwalk three times a day I know most of the local dogs by sight and many by name. I also know their regular walkers, but on Sunday the regular walker is in Central on her day off. Some of the local owners are a bit disturbed by the discovery that a complete stranger is on first-name terms with their dogs. Still, at least they do walk their dogs themselves on Sunday. It would be nice to think that they do a spot of cooking as well, but a bit optimistic. On Sundays our neighbourhood is alive with the sound of motor scooters with boxes on the back. Sunday is for slow parking and fast pizza.