Vivian vs Sydney's Automobile Terrorists

My new-ish car, Vivian, who was very generously given to me. She is very good at fending off terrorists

Well my parental ancestors have had the singular misfortune…AHEM…bless'd sweet priv’lege to relocate to Old Sydney Town. And being the good son that I am, I decided it was probably about time that I went and paid them a visit. And so I, along with my exceedingly patient feminine companion and incomparable navigator, Elicia, hopped into Vivian, my venerable Holden, and trundled off in a vaguely northward direction. 

Trundling along in a vaguely northward direction is something I am quite accustomed to, after years of meandering through mountainous milieu, drifting through desertous deserts and ambling across alluvial arid agronomists’ armpits (a very desolate and intimidating landscape I assure you), and I would say that it is something that I am quite comfortable with. And indeed, for the majority of the day, for to get to Old Sydney Town it is a good day’s travel, I was in a very comfortable state of mind. 

But I noticed that as we started to near the borderlands of Sydney, my comfort and rested demeanour began to change. Perhaps it was something to do with the fact that a long day of driving, pleasant though it might have been, was starting to get to me; it may have been the fact that I probably hadn’t eaten in a while…or it may have been the fact that the drivers around me started becoming much more…volatile.

It was like Darwinian evolution, but backwards. The closer we got to the end of our journey, the more primitive the driving instincts of my neighbouring motorists began to become. Suddenly it was as if the lines on the road were but recommendations, and the encroaching headlights of tailgaters became more spectral and resembled that of a mountain lion who, upon creeping up behind the rump of a particularly witless deer, was revelling in the carnivorous anticipation of a protein-rich meal that was soon to be gurgling in his wicked intestines. 

It felt as if the radiator of the BMW behind me was particularly fond of smooching Victorian number plates, and that the gentleman on my right in the 2001 Holden Commodore Ute had lost all of his fingers but the middle one. 

My automotive opponents were of two distinct and completely irreconcilable classes: either soccer mums with the malice of corporate lawyers and the bank accounts of Turkish mob bosses, or foul-looking miscreants with the fragile ego of Jericho’s chief architect, and driving Commodores with paint jobs that looked like Picasso had been walking past and had tripped on the cat, spilling a can of liquid rust liberally all over the bonnet. 

And the roads. Great glorious stampeding penguins. The roads.

As Doc Hudson from Cars once sagaciously said, “You gotta turn left to turn right”. It was total unadulterated anarchy.

Everyone knew where they were going, no one knew how to indicate, and the signage was about as coherent as the United Nations’ mission statement. 

And for Sydneysiders, honking the horn is a way of life. They do it all the time. To yell at you, to tell you to change lanes, to say that you probably could have gone at that last orange light, to say g’day, to order their HappyMeal® at the DriveThru® and to ask how your day has been before they cut you off and leave you sandwiched between two monstrous looking trucks like a slice of cured Appalachian ham indefinitely trapped between two delicately cut pieces of pumpkinseed and fig husk wholemeal mixed grain bread.

If you intend to drive in Sydney, I recommend coating your car in kevlar, and arming yourself with roof turrets, oil slick launchers, and anti-automobile land torpedoes. It’s the only way to survive in this urban jungle.