A Simpler Time

Look, I don’t know why I have to take human lessons. I’m actually from this planet, albeit 300 years in the past when things were quite a bit simpler. I like to think I’m adapting, but this technological whizz-bangery and all the people walking around dressed with such impropriety only hasten my efforts to locate that confounded hole in space and time and return to the King’s green England.

But until then, I must sit in a classroom surrounded by ghouls and demons and, apparently, wizards, learning about these admittedly fascinating motor machines that are now commonplace. Car servicing near Ringwood: that today’s topic, which left me earnestly wishing for the days of my childhood when I was in Sunday school, learning about sums, and why the foreign types would never defeat our great empire.

It seems that these ‘cars’ require ‘car servicing’, and sometimes ‘brake repair’. A brake is something that stops the car from going forward, so you can guarantee that if I ever find myself behind the ‘steering wheel’ (like the reigns of a horse, I suppose), then it’s going to be the first thing for which I look. The second will be the door handle, so that I may exit the vehicle with the greatest of haste, for I am not in possession of a ‘driving license’, which entitles one to sit in a car and operate one of the several hundred blinking buttons, knobs and levers. Surely, acquiring a driving license must require at least three years of intense study, which it seems like this entire world has found the time for, because crossing a road is a trial indeed.

I’m here to learn about the superficial aspects of mechanics. Ringwood, the place in which I find myself, simply has too many cars on the roads to blatantly ignore them, as much as I’d prefer to do just that. Imagine it: this hypothesised continent not only existing, but being inhabited by people who resemble myself! Unwashed and often unshaven, and with far too many of these motor vehicles, but otherwise much the same. 

-Percival