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| Me, outside Hammersmith flat, London, August 1973 |
He’s 7 and it seems like a good time to get into racing electric cars. Not EV’s like Tesla, mind, but little electric cars on a track in your lounge room. That you race against your mates, with a little speed controller.
The one I bought him via Amazon is not actually the famous Scalextrix, but a knock-off brand, which was the only one available for Australia, with me making the purchase here in Hong Kong.
Anyway, here’s the thing I wanted to talk about:
Namely that this item got a high Dissatisfaction rating (1-Star) of 17%. Normally that would be enough to say, no, and move onto the next brand. But there wasn’t a next brand. And in any case what were the complaints about? Answer, mainly two. (i) When fitting the pieces of track together, they didn’t always mesh well and lost power. And (ii) the cars didn’t always connect well to the metal line on the racetrack, and so also lost power and stopped.
This reminded me of my time in London, when I was living in Hammersmith in 1973, above.
I was sharing a flat with two others, one a young American woman, a Grace Jones look-alike, if you imagine Grace at 23. A tall, slim, elegant, woman from New York City. We were both at a loose end at the time, me in between jobs as a bookkeeper at the local meat-pie factory and as a Butler’s Valet in Scotland (for which I’d bought the duds above, at the local Oxfam shop). She, “Grace”, a singer-songwriter “in between gigs”.
We were young, it was hot August days, it was London, it was a London still in thrall to the summers of love, of rock ’n roll, of weed and wonder... we were young, alone, at home, together.... You can imagine. I imagine now. But for the sake of historical accuracy, I'm bound to record -- all these years later, with a tiny touch of wonder and amazement, but also, perhaps, with a hint of embarrassment -- that we remained thoroughly, rigidly, conspicuously, platonic.
We raced Scalextrix. Prim, proper, platonic... Scalextrix.
For some reason there was a massive Scalextrix in the lounge room of our flat. Right there taking up all the room. It must have belonged to the third of our flatmates, for it certainly wasn’t mine and I can’t imagine it was Grace’s. I remember playing it a lot with Grace. She beat me regularly. As women do. Beat men, I mean.
And so we played Scalextrix. Two adults in their mid-twenties. Played electric cars and listened to music.
Often the track would break down. And we’d fix it with aluminium foil or some other conducive metal if the foil didn’t work. And for the cars, when they stopped, it was usually because the brush underneath wasn’t touching the metal rail enough. We found the solution was to add some steel wool. A tiny beard, a mini goatee (a Poirot?) of steel brush.
I remember the fixing up more than I remember the actual racing. The fixing was fun. We enjoyed it.
And that’s the point. Which is that making stuff and fixing stuff is something we should all do more of. It’s grounding. It’s memorable. It makes you a better person, a more rounded, a more capable person.
So, I went ahead and bought it, the one for Grandson Rocky, not quite despite its high Dissatisfaction rating of 17%, but pretty much Because of it.
I hope young Rocky can enjoy the “Scalextrix”, both the racing and the fixing. The Working. And the Fixing. Both.
Happy Birthday, Grandson! May you go on to build and fix many things.
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ADDED: Here it is, in Rocky's hands:
