Under Six Parsnips

Town Mouse - that’s what I am. I know or understand almost nothing about “the country”.

What are those crops? Where is everything? When should that thing with the blades be used? How often do sheep have a haircut? Do you have to inspect that fence every week or century? Come to that, why is that vast, totally empty - whatever that is - fenced? Those giant, circular hay-bales that seem to have come into fashion, why do they just sit there by themselves? Are they the leftovers from crop-circles?  Why Country music, why?

As Emergency Contact (EC) and I put the necessary kilometres on the lease car, the list of what I don’t understand about the country only grows. For instance, electric tea-candles on restaurant tables. If you were going to do away with lighting tables with real candles, why fake a stupid little tea-candle in a coloured glass bowl? Another one; Australian flags on letterboxes. You are pounding along the left side of a highway, bounded by yellow, dry scrub with the occasional appearence of a gum tree or kangaroo carcass. There is quite simply nowhere else you could be. The flag seems a bit redundant.

I’ve written a couple of blobs on getting the miles on the lease car. We had a few to get, let me tell you. This weekend we did a pretty impressive loop. We went out via Pluto, looped in as far as Saturn, swung back out to Neptune and then came back in via Saturn again. I’m not joking. Not even a purile Uranus one. Let me explain, because this was one country feature I totally understood.

Using the Anglo-Australian Telescope Dome at Siding Springs as a model of the sun (at 1:38,000,000 scale) there’s a little bit of science art radiating out from there. It’s called the Solar System Drive and at appropriate distances away from the dome, the other bodies of the solar system are represented to scale, on billboards. It gives you a nice impression of how vast and appropriately named space is, when you pass a billiard ball on a sign that says “Pluto” and then you drive for a couple of hours at a 100 km/h and then pass a blue basketball on a billboard that says “Neptune”.

One hundred kilometres an hour in the one to 38 million scale model is three times the speed of light. That’s ticking along, Chewie. Sorry, I mean EC. We’ll get those lease car kilometre easy peasy.