{"id":3021,"date":"2018-11-21T18:01:36","date_gmt":"2018-11-21T18:01:36","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/jameslawless.net\/?p=3021"},"modified":"2018-11-21T18:12:27","modified_gmt":"2018-11-21T18:12:27","slug":"problems-with-motor-cars","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/?p=3021","title":{"rendered":"Problems with Motor Cars"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>
\nMy first motor car was an old Morris Minor. I got it in the seventies and I could drive anywhere in it with impunity: into town, on dates, to the mountains and the sea. There was never a problem with parking space. I even remember parking in O’Connell Street. Little did I know then what the motor car would become with its ubiquity changing what had been a pleasure into a nightmare. The friendly vehicle had become a monster. It strangulated lives in gridlocks, distorted faces of drivers into visages of angst, their blood pressure raised as they impotently sat immobile, unable for fight or flight, in huge parking lots like the M50.
\nChivalry frequently goes out the door now when some people get behind a wheel. There are too many concerns to bother to indicate when one eventually gets to move. There are people smoking\u2014who can blame them? or engrossed on their mobile phones. I have seen drivers pick their noses, comb their hair, put on makeup, shave and even brush their teeth. All these things I can put up with, but my biggest bugbear, the one that makes me see red before I even come near a traffic light, is block parking. I have experienced it outside garden gates rendering people virtual prisoners in their own homes. I have seen it at schools, but the worst I experienced was in a church parking area. I had come out of the church and received an urgent phone call to say a family member had taken ill. I found my car blocked by another car. I had to wait for fifteen minutes until a lady appeared nonchalantly chatting to a friend. She got into the blocking car and drove away oblivious to the world around her.
\nThat same Morris Minor figures in my novel, Peeling Oranges
\n\"\"<\/a>
\nwhen Jack the tailor buys an old car for his daughter Sin\u00e9ad to the later regretted mocking of her boyfriend Derek: <\/p>\n

It\u2019s a sultry summer\u2019s day when Sin\u00e9ad gets the motor car. Her father bought it for her. She uses it to deliver pants and suits to draperies throughout the suburbs.
\n\t\u2018More and more made to order, less and less made to measure,\u2019 Jack says about the suits as if all human frames are gradually being homogenised.
\n\tWhen I see the car, I laugh. It is a black Morris Minor, 1957 model.
\n\t\u2018You\u2019re the first person under fifty that I\u2019ve seen drive one of those. I bet it doesn\u2019t go more than twenty miles an hour.\u2019
\n\t\u2018Jump in and I\u2019ll show you.\u2019
\n\t\u2018How about going for a swim?\u2019
\n\t\u2018We can collect our swimsuits on the way.\u2019
\n\tWe speak in Irish for a while. But the sun is shining, forcing a levity in us. Eventually she tires of trying to win me over.
\n\t\u2018If Tadhg Rua saw me now,\u2019 she says in English, \u2018he\u2019d be laughing at me.\u2019
\n\t\u2018Why should he? Your point was about freedom. You have the right to choose. There are two national languages.\u2019
\n\tWhen we get onto the open road, she puts her foot down on the accelerator and the motorcar shakes like a sack of bones.
\n\t\u2018There\u2019s a hole in the floor,\u2019 I say.
\n\t\u2018That\u2019s the emergency brake.\u2019 She laughs and revs up the engine some more.
\n\t\u2018Sin\u00e9ad, take it easy.\u2019
\n\t\u2018Not till you take back what you said.\u2019
\n\t\u2018What did I say?\u2019
\n\t\u2018About Morris Minors.\u2019
\n\t\u2018I take it back. Watch out.\u2019
\n\tShe swerves suddenly, but is unable to avoid hitting a dog which was nonchalantly stepping off a kerb. The dog scurries for a bit, whining, and then lies down panting on the road, blood oozing from his head. We spread a newspaper on the back seat of the car and bring him to a vet.
\n\tSin\u00e9ad drives slowly for the rest of the journey. She\u2019s upset about the dog. \u2018Will it be all right?\u2019 \u2018They\u2019ll look after it,\u2019 I say. When we reach the sea, her humour improves, and we park the car and walk along the beach looking for a sheltered spot.
\n \tShe slides out of her figurehugging jeans in a sand dune.
\n\t\u2018Don\u2019t look,\u2019 she says, and we both laugh out of the well of memory. And I wonder is it possible she may have left her ideological baggage in some faraway terminal to be collected later?
\n\tWe run what seems like a half mile to catch the sea. I look at the wide, virtual emptiness of an Irish beach, and I think of the congestion of sprawling flesh frying under a Spanish sun. And I think of space and the lack of it, and single rooms with families and rent collectors knocking down doors, and I know now why Liberties\u2019 children love the seaside. <\/p>\n

Peeling Oranges is a novel full of personal and political intrigue, fraught with ideology, as it intersects the histories of two emergent nations\u2014Ireland and Spain. It is also a beautiful and lyrically written love story of childhood sweethearts\u2014the apolitical Derek and the passionate nationalist, Sin\u00e9ad N\u00ed Sh\u00failleabh\u00e1in.
\n‘A book to lose oneself in. I highly recommend it.’ Gabriel Byrne.
\n‘In the vast sea of fiction it is a true hidden gem’. Contemporary Books.<\/p>\n

Read more from Peeling Oranges or buy the book at: https:\/\/www.amazon.com\/gp\/product\/1496007646\/ref=dbs_a_def_rwt_hsch_vapi_taft_p1_i1
\nhttps:\/\/www.amazon.co.uk\/Peeling-Oranges-James-Lawless\/dp\/1496007646\/ref=la_B001JOXD96_1_58_twi_pap_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1542821105&sr=1-58<\/p>\n

Email subscribers to my blog at http:\/\/jameslawless.net\/?page_id=30
\nare eligible to receive a free digital copy of Peeling Oranges.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

My first motor car was an old Morris Minor. I got it in the seventies and I could drive anywhere in it with impunity: into town, on dates, to the mountains and the sea. There was never a problem with…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-3021","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3021","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=3021"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3021\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3028,"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3021\/revisions\/3028"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=3021"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=3021"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jameslawless.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=3021"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}