LIGHTING-UP TIME

Evening Post, Volume CXXIII, Issue 1, 2 January 1937, Page 20

LIGHTING-UP TIME

The lighting-up hour all next week is 11.28 p.m. The enjoyment of motoring depends very largely on the quality of the driving. There can be no comfort where there is no confidence. A driver may be efficient, and yet temperamentally of a type that does not create confidence, just as an artist may belong to the heights of genius and yet be uncomfortable to live or associate with. Indeed, the very efficiency of a driver can create discomfort and always will where the efficiency is made a matter of display. There are many drivers like that, probably just as many as there are bad drivers whose fault is inefficience. The secret of all good driving is anticipation. Anything may happen, and. the good driver is prepared for anything. He never gets himself into a jam, and is always prepared against anyone else putting him in a jam. Un flustered at all times he keeps a cool head, and this very attitude of unperturbedness creates a similar one in the passengers, until the stage is reached where the passenger ceases to think at all about the driving or the roai, and sets his attention on other things. All worth-while motoring is of the kind where everything but the car., the traffic, or the road form the topic of conversation. There is fto pleusure going about thinking only of the traffic, the car, or the road, which are solely the concern of the man at the wheel, and who is best left to attend to that concern. He can converse quite readily, but the conversation should not be about his job —the driving—nor should it be of a typ'i to distract his attention from that job, The passengers are entitled to look about for as many white horses as they please, but they should not ask the driver to do the looking for .them. It is quite likely he will see them first, and see more of them, but it iii out of his province to make them the subject of his attention. Leave him. to his job and you will enjoy your day out very much better.

With a bad driver motoring can never be comfortable, even though it be :;afe. There is no pleasure in being jerked to a stop on any or every occasion, in being rushed up to corners and slowed down in a hurry to go round, in having one's neck half dislocated with violent use of the clutch and gears, or in talking into the face of a driver at speed when his eyes ought to be on what is in front of him, and not the back seat. It may be rade not to look at people to whom one is talking, but it a rudeness essential to the driver of a motor-car and nothing like so disconcerting as the driver's attention removed from his job. Accidents happen often in less than a split second and it is just that little inattention that may be the cause/ or at any rate that prevents any chance there might be of the accident being avoided. How often one hears of somebody that has knocked someone else down, "I didn't see •him." Of course. He came from nowhere, nowhere within the driver's vision, for the simple reason that the driver's vision was elsewhere—white horses, maybe.