Where Radius Curve Meets Revenue Vertical

Summer’s sounds are now long faded, replaced by the less enchanting sounds of autumn. Soon follows winter’s barely-listenable soundtrack, which is so dull I usually flee the country.

In fact, even the summer past wasn’t a sonic delight. I’d rate the various storms at around 6.5 out of ten. There were some isolated highlights, but nothing like the previous summer’s genuinely impressive thunder and lightning displays. One evening we hit 110 decibels, according to the app on my phone.

(Note: I do not really know how decibels work, nor what an “app” is. But apparently I have such a thing, and it measures other things.)

As usual, however, when nature lets us down, humans step in and fill the breach. I live above a road featuring a tight curve. It’s a second-gear curve, for those motorists of the manual persuasion. That narrow fifty metres or so of bitumen delivered a summer of unexpected aural intrigue.

You see, this is not just your regulation 60 kmh speed zone tight curve. It is what is known technically as a “decreasing radius curve”. That means the corner becomes tighter as it continues.

So if you arrive at that corner in a rapid manner—so rapid that at entry your car is at the very limit of its attachment to the road—you will shortly find yourself well beyond that limit, at which moment you commence a brief and thrilling journey to the scene of the accident.

I do not have a clear view from my property of the corner, which means all data is hearing-derived. Usually it goes something like this:

First we detect an urgent and high-pitched engine note, indicating that one of the local boys (they’re almost always boys) is swiftly advancing upon the curve in question.

Then follows, especially when the roads are wet, screaming tyres as brakes are applied in desperate panic. That decreasing radius gets them almost every time.

And then a final, very conclusive thump.

During the most recent of these events, I happened to be outside sipping wine with the missus. We heard the engine and the tyres, and then held our forefingers aloft waiting for phase three. Thump. Right on cue. Fingers down. Glasses up.

There is generally a sad fourth phase, as the damaged vehicle limps away from its crash like a wounded animal returning to its lair. It is not a happy sound, all punctured tyres, scraping metal and escalated insurance rates.

I was recently discussing with a local chap my theories of decreasing radius curves and their fascinating difficulties. He didn’t seem very interested, however, possibly because right then his Nissan was jammed backwards into an embankment near the curve’s exit.

In his case, the impact had not been one from which he could immediately drive away. His vehicle’s rear driving wheels were suspended some distance from the ground, making escape impossible.

The sound sequence provided by my Nissan friend was distinct from anything I’d heard to that point. The engine note, yes, that was familiar. And so too the tortured tyres.

But the final thump was followed not by mournful mechanical limping but by anguished human screams.

Fearing someone was hurt, I walked quickly to the curve. Thankfully, no bodies were in trees and no heads were rolling down the street. There was just a distressed young fellow and his substantially dented first car, now at a thirty-degree angle to the road and going nowhere.

My decreased radius conversational gambit having failed, I tried a new approach. Noting that lights were being flicked on in nearby houses—it was 1 a.m. or thereabouts—I suggested the police might shortly be on their way.

This angle created some interest, as you will imagine. And I had an equally attention-grabbing secondary observation. With the Nissan driver was his young friend, aboard a Holden Commodore of some type. To quickly extract the Nissan and to therefore avoid immediate police inquiries, I advised a gentle nudging by the Holden.

It would have taken a few dollars off the paintwork, obviously, but for that minor penalty greater trouble will have been avoided. Holden didn’t buy it, however, even though his friend’s eyes pleaded for sacrifice. Instead he volunteered for a trip into town where he’d obtain a sturdy rope, fit for towing.

And he set off.

We ran some quick calculations. These were not comforting. Holden would need to cover twice the distance as a police car leaving the local station, and then he’d need to return with enough time in hand to complete the towing operation.

Nissan even came up with an estimated time of police car arrival, which turned out to be far more accurate than his curve attempt. Unable to provide further assistance, I left Nissan and the attending officers to arrive at their conclusions.

Now, I live in an area where some tolerance is shown towards the immature and speedy. Most of us here enjoy our driving and recall our own youthful misadventures. Just so long as P-platers are hitting trees and not hitting kids, we’ll let it slide, so to speak.

I became a reasonably good driver by experiencing the consequences of being a very poor driver, which sometimes involved close and unrequested inspections of roadside foliage. And to this day I still attract the occasional velocity punishment and associated licence revocation, which means I’m not exactly in an ideal moral position to judge others.

But following so many summer thumps at this particular curve, it was generally felt something needed to be done. And something was.

We found out about it near summer’s end, when a police letter arrived informing my very safe, very cautious, very law-abiding wife she’d been heavily fined for travelling at 61 kmh in a 50 kmh zone just a kilometre up from Nissan Corner.

I didn’t have the decibel app turned on, but I think a record may have been broken.

THE international movement against climate change is now led by sixteen-year-old autistic Swedish girl Greta Thunberg, which is at least a step up from the likes of Al Gore and Tim Flannery.

Thunberg is the lass whose occasional one-gal protests outside Stockholm’s parliament have inspired children worldwide to stage so-called school strikes, which in Australia inevitably take place on Fridays. They’re long weekends against climate change, and they helpfully demonstrate the comical hysteria consuming our young.

During Sydney’s most recent child uprising, fourteen-year-old Stella Brazier burst into tears when a journalist asked for her expert opinion.

“It just upsets me so much because I just don’t know if they [politicians] are going to do anything,” sobbing Stella said.

“What’s going to happen to humankind, what’s going to happen to the whole world?”

It will be destroyed, Stella. Ponies and kittens are at the top of the execution list.

In fact, the great global challenge may be simply keeping climate activists alive for long enough to witness the coming apocalypse. They’re not the brightest crowd. One of them, British academic Dr Larch Maxey, lately found himself defeated by a basic doorway.

It had been Maxey’s intention to glue himself to the doors at Bristol City Council as part of his demand that the council declare a climate emergency. So he turned up with some superglue and a friend to film his dramatic call to action.

Video posted on YouTube shows Maxey—an organiser with climate panic group Extinction Rebellion—applying glue to his hands and advancing upon the doors. At which point they fly open. They’re automatic, which presents Maxey with a few problems.

Despite repeated attempts, the doors keep opening before Maxey can become attached.  Eventually he gives up, utterly confounded by a technology beyond his comprehension.

According to his online biography, this fellow “graduated in Law from the University of Manchester in 1993, European Environmental Policy and Regulation (Lancaster University) in 1995 and with a PhD in Geography from Swansea University in 2002”. None of these degrees taught him about doors.

There may be a positive side to all of this madness. Certain individuals on the Left who still possess residual levels of common sense are tiring of climate histrionics and are beginning to turn against those who promote it.

Labor’s Anthony Albanese, for example, is frequently the target of inner-Sydney climate protesters. They turned up again during the children’s strike, demanding Albanese account for his climate crimes and at one point declaring: “We just want to kill ScoMo.”

Nice kids. Anyway, this all seems to have pushed Albanese too far. At a subsequent Opera House speaking event, the Labor frontbencher lashed out.

“They think they’re gonna win. They think everyone wants to stop Adani,” he said.

“They think everyone wants particular things. They don’t know where Adani is! They don’t! I asked someone the other day and they said ‘It’s on the Great Barrier Reef’. Actually it’s not, you know.”

Welcome to the world of the sane, Albo.