Author archive
Funeral Cortege Etiquette: Follow That Hearse
Nobody likes going to funerals. For a start off, you’re dealing with having lost someone you knew, or you’re there to support a friend who’s lost someone. Then you have to dress up in smart, dark clothing, head off to a church or chapel that you may not be familiar with, sit on uncomfortable seats and hope like mad that half a billion relatives don’t stand up and give interminable eulogies. Then you’ve got the trip to the graveside, following the hearse.
This procession of cars behind a hearse going from the church/mosque/chapel/synagogue/other significant ceremonial place is known as a cortege. Or cortège if you want the fancy French spelling. This is supposed to be a stately procession. The idea here is that the hearse leads the way, usually taking the minister/priest/rabbi and the coffin. The chief mourners (i.e. immediate family) will come next in the procession. To take part in the cortege, set out from the chapel or wherever the funeral was held and follow the hearse. Don’t dawdle.
When you are driving in the cortege, you get to have your headlights on dip during the day (here’s where you hope you can override those automatically dipping headlights). Also don’t forget to turn your headlights off when you get to the cemetery or everybody will get a flat battery. Don’t overtake other people in the procession and let the hearse set the pace.
Well, in most situations, you let the hearse set the pace. At my father-in-law’s funeral, we (a) had quite a long way to go to get to the cemetery, (b) had a hearse with a fairly powerful engine and (c) had a petrol-head vicar who might have been egging the hearse driver on. I don’t know how fast that hearse was going, but my husband didn’t half have to plant the boot in the Ford Fairmont we had back then to keep up with the hearse. Other family members struggled to keep up the pace and one bunch of my in-laws who had a less zesty Honda Odyssey MPV were Not Impressed. It would have been a traffic cop’s dream situation: a whole line of people all over the speed limit, quota of speeding tickets filled in one day and a great story about I Clocked A Hearse Doing 120+ To The Cemetery.
What if you are not part of the funeral procession? What’s the best thing to do when you see a long line of cars with their headlights on dip containing drivers in dark suits following a hearse? These days, you probably need to check to make sure that it isn’t just a bunch of car-pooling businesspeople with daytime running lights, but usually the presence of a hearse, children in the car and several cars that are too old to have daytime running lights are a bit of a giveaway.
What you may not know if you see a funeral procession is that you have to give way to it. This means all the cars in the procession. In New South Wales, it’s actually against the law to break into the funeral procession, cut in or otherwise interfere with the smooth process of getting mourners to the graveside on time for the final part of saying goodbye. Even if it wasn’t the law, it’s common decency and respect for others.
You can see why if you can imagine the same situation taking place on foot. If you saw the minister and the pallbearers carrying the coffin on foot along a walkway, followed by black-clad grieving relatives wielding tissues, you wouldn’t overtake them and get into the procession if you were approaching from the rear. (In other words, overtaking Cousin Hannah with all the kids in tow so you walk between her and Cousin Jeff before overtaking Cousin Jeff and Uncle Timothy…) If you were approaching them at right angles, you wouldn’t barge straight on through them, getting in the way. The same rules of courtesy apply when you are in a car rather than on foot. Dipped headlights are the motoring equivalent of black clothes, tissues and flags at half-mast. Respect them.
Unfortunately, a number of people have reported rude drivers cutting in to funeral processions, either by not giving way to them or by overtaking and interrupting the procession. Obviously, traffic lights don’t count (if the hearse driver has any sense, he/she will drop the speed so other members of the procession can keep up and not get lost.).
If you do lose sight of the rest of the cortege, your phone will come in handy (hands-free if you’re the driver). Cemeteries are usually located outside central business areas and may involve obscure suburban streets. Having another relative with the phone on in other cars will help if you do get lost or separated from the rest of the procession. Just don’t forget to turn it off when you get to the cemetery.
If you are not part of the procession, then give way. Pull over and let them pass you if you accidentally find yourself in the middle of a cortege. Yes, it’s inconvenient and you don’t want to. However, the people in the procession don’t want to be there either and they’re going through a lot more inconvenience than you. If you’re late for a meeting, your clients/boss/co-workers understand (even if it’s a job interview, this might earn you points for courtesy). Or go around another way if you’re really in a hurry. Yes, life is busy these days. But it’s not so busy that you can’t be respectful of other people’s feelings and show some respect.
Have other people had experiences with funeral processions that were interrupted by rude drivers cutting in? Or any other examples of a cortege that didn’t quite go according to the textbook plan? Share your stories here.
Safe and happy driving,
Megan
Equipping The Perfect Parent’s Taxi
If you have children over school age, you probably have to ferry them around to school, sports, parties, activities and heaps more. What’s more, given our busy schedules these days, it’s usually all done in a rush. Or at least getting everybody into the car with everything they’re supposed to have is done in a rush. Traffic lights and speed limits stop the actual driving being done in a rush.
Oh, the freedom that comes when your teenager gets their P-plate and can take themselves to activities! Strange that they’re probably thinking the same thing.
However, while the madness is going on, it’s a wise idea to have your car well equipped with everything that you might need. All those family-sized SUVs, station wagons and MPVs come with stacks of storage space, so you may as well take advantage of it and put the stuff you are going to need in into it. Careful planning will mean that your car and what’s in it will help save your sanity.
The well-equipped Mum’s Taxi or Dad’s Taxi should have the following:
- Easily stored food that can be fed to small sports players after training who forgot to pack a post-training snack. This helps fend off the whingeing to visit McDonalds and grizzles fuels by low blood sugar. Dried fruit and nuts store well. If you have a diabetic in the family, a good supply of barley sugars, jelly beans or little sachets of sugar picked up in cafés are another must.
- A first aid kit with plenty of sticking plasters. Vital when some kid decides to kill time at the traffic lights by picking off a scab and bleeding all over the place.
- Paracetamol or aspirin. Make sure it’s the sort that doesn’t need to be taken in water.
- A spare jacket or sweatshirt, preferably several. Inevitably, there will come a day when it suddenly buckets down with a southerly buster and someone failed to bring warm clothes. Sometimes, that person is you.
- A few grooming tools – hairbrush or comb and a few hair ties. If you’re really in a hurry in the mornings and you have girls with long hair, the girls can brush their own hair in the car while travelling along. For that matter, so can you (not recommended if one member of the family has headlice).
- Books to keep the troops amused if you break down or have to wait for ages for the road works. Large thin ones that tuck into back-of-the-seat pockets are easy to store. Have several handy to avoid squabbles.
- Wipes. For dealing with the blood after putting a bandage on the child who picked off the scab. Also good for cleaning faces.
- Hand sanitiser. Even if you find a public toilet when some child is busting to pee, said toilet may not have soap. Enough said.
- A travel potty. For when you are stuck in traffic on the M1 or Sydney Harbour Bridge or whatever and someone needs to pee. It sounds disgusting but it’s a lot better than having someone wet their pants, as the smell will linger in the seat for ages. Just remember to empty it at the end of your journey. For Number 1 only, not Number 2.
- A towel. For cleaning up vomit if someone throws up, for wiping down fogged windscreens, for protecting seats if someone fell into the mud at the park, for folding into a neck support when someone falls asleep, for using as a blanket… If you were into the sci-fi cult classic Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy, then you’ll have heard of the usefulness of towels. Like Ford Prefect, know where your towel is. (Question: the alien Ford Prefect in that series adopted that name because these cars were so common on the roads. If the late Douglas Adams was writing his series today, what would he have called this character? Toyota Corolla?).
Safe and happy driving, whether or not you’re on Parent Taxi duty,
Megan
Thoughts On Auto-Dipping Headlights
We’ve had automatic dusk-sensing headlights. We’ve had cornering headlights and auto-levelling headlights. Now the latest in active safety for headlights is being seen in a number of new models: automatic dipping headlights.
In a way, automatically dipping headlights use the same sort of light sensing technology as dusk-sensing headlights. However, instead of realising that there aren’t enough photons hitting the sensors so the lights come on, this technology realises that all of a sudden there are far too many photons coming in so those high-beam headlights had better dip pronto so the oncoming driver doesn’t get dazzled.
Half of me thinks that this is a great idea. Haven’t we all had experiences when an oncoming driver doesn’t dip his or her headlights until the last minute, leaving you blinking and frantically trying to regain your night vision? (Safety hint: pull over if you can until you’re no longer dazzled). It’s always a bit of a puzzle as to what to do: do you flicker your lights between dipped and full to let the driver know that he/she needs to dip in return – and run the risk of having two dazzled drivers driving at speed in opposite directions with all the risks involved in that – or whether you just grit your teeth and mutter something along the lines of “stupid idiot”, to put it mildly. Sometimes, you ARE that driver who forgets to dip the lights. There’s also the situation where one or both of you decide to take the headlights off dip just a fraction of a second too early, giving the oncoming driver the full blast of your headlights on full (no joke with some of those very bright modern headlights). Auto dipping headlights would certainly get rid of this problem.
However, there’s another part of me that doesn’t like this idea. This part of me kind of likes deciding when to dip the lights as an oncoming driver approaches. It’s kind of like playing chicken legally and safely – who’s going to be the first to dip the lights? There have been a few incidents during long night-time drives on those road trips to the relatives who live a long, long way off that deciding when to dip the headlights has been the main way to keep the driver (and the passengers) alert, as it breaks up the monotony of night-time driving. If it hadn’t been for the shall-we-dip-yet-or-shall-we-wait decision, the risk of nodding off with the hypnotic effect of white lines and reflectors flicking past repetitively would have been a lot higher. This part of me thinks that this “safety feature” to keep you awake, focussed and alert outweighs the risk of a bit of dazzling.
I also have a host of questions. Do these headlights have a manual override so you can dip the headlights if you want to, like when you’re part of a funeral cortege? Do they dip automatically when you get to a built-up area? Do they pick up cyclists, motorbikes and those cars that only have one working headlight? You never get to test-drive new cars at night (even car salespeople need to sleep sometimes), so how do you test this out?
What do other people think about the prospect of auto-dimming headlights? Love them or hate them?
Safe and happy driving at all times of day,
Megan
A Car That Turns Head For The Wrong Reasons: The Reliant Robin
And on top of the other weirdness, the bonnet opens backwards.
There are some cars that turn heads for the right reasons. You look at them and think “Wow!” I remember nearly going off the road the first time I saw a vehicle that I loved the styling of (it was a 2000 model Ford Falcon XR6, by the way – although I mistook it for a Jaguar at first glance). Others are a pure dream to drive and seem to have been created by designers who really think about what people need and want (something I’ve experienced with the Volvo and the Saab I’ve owned over the years – bravo, Sweden!).
Others turn heads for the wrong reasons. They leave you wondering what on earth the design team was thinking. You wonder how on earth the cars in question got off the drawing board, let alone the sales yard. One car in particular stands out as a real head-turner (for the wrong reasons) and head-scratcher: the Reliant Robin.
If you’ve seen a Mr Bean episode, you’ve probably seen a Reliant Robin. It’s the three-wheeled blue thing that perpetually gets shunted out of the way by Bean’s beloved yellow Mini . This vehicle wasn’t, as I once thought back in my teen years, specially created by the producers of the Mr Bean series as a joke. It is for real. A design team really did sit down and a car company really did make a car with three wheels. What’s more, it sold. Apparently, the “Plastic Pig”, as it came to be called, is the second-most popular fibreglass vehicle. It also went through three facelifts (all of which kept the three wheels) and was produced up until 2001.
The idea behind the Reliant Robin was frugality and innovation. It was developed back in the 1970s during the oil crisis, so cars with small engines were highly desirable (some things don’t change). This had the benefit of bringing the Mini and the Fiat 500 to public attention but it also produced some right horrors. As well as the Reliant Robin, another mid-1970s horror was the Sebring-Vanguard CitiCar, an electric vehicle (yep, things haven’t changed) that was great in the fuel consumption department but looked singularly hideous and had windows that zipped up.
The Sebring Citicar.
But why, oh why did they make it with just three wheels? It doesn’t make for better aerodynamics to increase the fuel economy. It certainly doesn’t make for better handling. Out of all the three-wheeled car designs (the Reliant Robin isn’t the only one in existence), the delta layout (one wheel at the front, two at the back) is the least stable and is prone to rolling when braking The “tadpole” layout – one at the back, two at the front, as seen in the BMW Isetta – is somewhat more stable.
The reason why they made it with three wheels was to make it more accessible: because of the engine size and because it had less than four wheels, it was classed as a motorbike for licensing and registration purposes. If you were a miner working in the north of England who needed to get to work cheaply but didn’t want to freeze your buttocks off on a motorbike, and you didn’t want to pay a packet for car registration, something like the Reliant Robin kind of made sense, especially as you could fit the family in the back, like you would with any three-door hatchback.
Specifications-wise, the Reliant Robin achieved its aim of good fuel economy. The 1970s model’s teeny little 750 cc engine (with 29.5 kW of power and 63 Nm of torque and a 0–100 km/h time of 17 seconds, depending on who you ask) could do 70 miles per gallon (that’s 4 L/100 km). The top speed of the Robin was 136 km/h, although given its performance when braking and cornering, you probably wouldn’t want to flog the little thing that hard. Especially as the body was made of fibreglass to keep the weight and fuel consumption down. Needless to say, the Reliant Robin has a rear-wheel-drive powertrain.
The Robin is notoriously unstable, with a tendency to lift rear wheels off the ground during hard braking or cornering. This is probably the main reason why it ended up being the patsy in the Mr Bean episodes: it was easy to roll, push, tip and otherwise abuse. Top Gear episodes have also taken the mickey out of the Robin. And the three-wheel design makes it look just plain weird.
However, as with all very distinctive cars, there are going to be a few people who are passionate about the quirkiness of the vehicle in question. Some people love the Robin. Heck, one specialist website claims that HRH Princess Anne once owned one. Owners say that they like the way that people stop to stare and smile at the car. Small children have been known to burst into laughter at the sight of a Robin. So I guess the Robin has the advantage of bringing more smiles and laughter into the world. If you want to do this, fine. Just remember two important things: (1) take it very, very easy around the corners, and (2) have another vehicle for taking the kids to school unless you want them to die of embarrassment (although it would make a good parental threat).
Safe and happy driving, whether you prefer two, three or four wheels,
Megan
Level 2, 9 Help Street