Reasons to be cheerful

Wednesday, 29th April 2009

I’m no sharpshooter but molehills aren’t mountains, and at 100 yards over open sights, when you’re standing unsupported, a slither of white plastic stuck into one looks vanishingly small along the barrel of a Winchester 30-30. That’s the sort of rifle — almost a carbine — you might have seen John Wayne twiddling around his finger in ancient westerns, though I wouldn’t fancy firing with one hand. The advantage of molehills is that the spurt of earth shows where your shots go, and the advantage of the Winchester (still made, 150 years on) is that it feels part of you: balanced, compact, handy, with a kick and bang that mean business.

That was the third time in a week I’d felt the not-quite mystical unity of man and machine that poets don’t write about (though Ted Hughes came close with a poem about a tractor). The second was a quietly ecstatic ride in the rain around the sodden grounds of Babington House in Somerset on a Skeppshult bicycle. Upright, comfortable, graceful, uncluttered by gears, it’s something made for you rather than something around which you have to fit. And it was infinitely easier to operate than the gadgetry in our designer bedroom suites, which had at least one of our party going to the loo, washing, brushing teeth and fumbling into bed in the dark while electrically operated curtains and blinds thrashed about, the television refused to be silenced, the radio refused to speak and the fashionable tin bath was placed in the middle of the floor just where you fall over it.

The occasion of this hilarity, as it became by breakfast, was the first example of man’s union with the machine. This one didn’t have a muzzle velocity of nearly 3,000 feet per second but it weighed approaching 3 tonnes and shifted itself at over 200mph. I didn’t quite manage that on the quiet roads of Somerset — anyway, it does only 195mph with the hood down — but there were bends, corners and swiftly swallowed straights that induced the gratifying illusion of at-one-ness. The car becomes an extension of you, going just where you want when you want, making you feel as precise and predictable as any of its myriad components.

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