Highlights-Oxford to Heathrow
I rented a car today at Heathrow so I could drive to interesting places along the south coast of England. I used my “Keep Left” note inserted in a vent as a reminder. I had some difficulty shifting because my hiking shoes would get stuck on a footrest to the left of the clutch (weird). Navigating to Winchester, an hour and a quarter south, was no problem. Finding the hotel parking lot after registering was much harder. The directions sounded like, “Drive back to Heathrow, then ….” After successfully parking, I popped into a cafe-bakery named Kneaded (“we have what you knead”). I had the unexpected pleasure of discussing philosophy with the woman behind the counter. She majored in it at uni, as the British say. That she was working in a bakery might have been an indication of where an undergrad degree in Philosophy would take you, but maybe she was using the free time it provided to work on an important treatise. I attended Evensong at the Winchester Cathedral at 5:30pm. At first, I thought I was the only one in the cathedral. After I found the secret path to the mini-chapel where it was actually being held, I found more people. Dessert at the Old Vine pub was spotted dick (I can say no more).
Driver’s Aid
Foot Rest, Shoe Collision
The footrest on the left, my shoe, and the clutch couldn’t occupy the same space at the same time
Winchester Cathedral
Reminds me of a song
Spotted Dick
… with cream.
Notable Items
Two things about the car rental counter experience at Heathrow stood out. First, the Europcar representative told me they didn’t recognize the insurance I purchased online when I reserved the vehicle. This made it useless and a waste of money to boot. I got a refund later from Expedia, but not without spending a lot of time navigating through the maze of unhelpful clutter in the knowledge base. I think this is by design so you’ll give up before you get a human to assist you. I have never experienced commercial website “knowledge bots” that can process “you charged me for an invalid product so give me my money back.” So much for AI being an existential threat to humanity, unless you count time wasted on websites!
The second item from my counter experience was the agent asking me for “all tens” on the post-return survey. This was one of many illustrations of Goodhart’s Law that I’ve encountered (“When a measure becomes a [performance] target, it ceases to be a good measure.”). The agent was friendly and helpful so I made a note to give him those marks on the survey.
The Vauxhall Corsa I rented had a foot rest on the floor too close to the clutch. It frequently caught my trail shoes as I shifted. I travel with cross trainers that have a wider sole than street shoes. The benefit when I am not shifting in poorly designed cars is I don’t have to carry running shoes. The Corsa had a tight gear box. The difference between 1st and 3rd was so narrow that I occasionally downshifted from 4th to 1st, missing 3rd. You don’t want to do that if you have any sharp objects behind your head in the rear seat.
Parking my car at the Winchester Royal Hotel was a case study in the difficulty of city driving in a foreign country without a human navigator. “Navigator” does not mean a warm body in the front passenger seat (I have some experience with this). A human navigator must have more than a pulse and the ability to speak. They have to be able to read a map and street signs so they know where they are on the map. In my experience, this is a rare combination.
Map apps on cellular phones (“mobiles” in England) and paper maps (I brought one from home as a backup) are useful enough for getting from one urban area to another. The generic task of parking is easy enough. Just look for an open space. Okay, parking is not so easy in cities because they have lots of tricky rules that go far beyond “Don’t park here” symbology.
The tricky navigational problem was finding the hotel’s designated parking area. Map apps are useless when the address is “down to the end of the street, turn right, and blah, blah, blah.” Of course, no one says “blah, blah, blah,” but that’s what it sounds like after the third instruction. That’s when everything the direction giver is saying sounds like those crazy map app verbal instructions, “take a slight right.” Slight right? What the heck is that?
Getting around the block, not going the wrong way on the one-way road system while glancing briefly at the map the clerk gave me was challenging. Staying on the left, rapid shifting, clutch foot getting stuck on the foot rest, narrow streets, construction, and not hitting people on bikes added to the difficulty. The most important thing the clerk at registration told me was that the entrance to the parking area was across from Stone “something.” That’s all that registered because it came at the end of the instructions.
Miracles do occur because I somehow found myself on the correct street. As I scanned for the entrance to the parking area like a submarine captain doing a periscope sweep for targets, trying not to hit parked cars that seemed to be practically in the middle of the street (did I mention they were narrow?), I saw it. A building sign reading “Stonemason Court.” Ha! That unpromising narrow alley on the left, obscured by the buildings on Parchment Street, *had* to be the parking area entrance.
Despite what I wrote in the highlights, I *do* have more to say about the spotted dick at the Old Vine pub. I saw it on the dessert menu and was intrigued. The name immediately generated a “What the heck is that?” reaction, a regular occurrence for me in England. The only time I’d heard it was watching the movie Shanghai Knights. If you’ve seen the movie, you’d have the same trepidation about ordering it as I did. England has a lot of desserts (their word is “puddings”) with strange names like “Eton Mess” and “posset.” While Eton Mess sounds like a poorly kept dormitory room, it is quite tasty (meringue, whipped cream, berries, etc.). I like to order menu items with strange names just to find out what they are.