The hands-free kid...

I’ve recently become the owner of a Parrot.

No, not the bird, I’ve got a new hands-free kit. The Parrot is pretty good. It clips to my sun visor and is voice command activated. It automatically downloaded my phone book and turned my keyed names into voice names, so that all I have to do is speak what I’ve keyed into my contact list. How cool - isn’t technology a marvel!

There’s just one problem - for some reason I have to repeat the contact name twice AND do my best imitation of Robby the Robot to make the voice recognition work! So, Richard Shore becomes Reechardddshiowww-Reechardddshiowww, Malcolm Chorley translates as Melcoomchurley-Melcoomchurley, Cockney Rebel is Cookneeyrooobel-Cookneeyrooobel and my daughter Cloë becomes Cloo-Cloo, which oddly enough is what I used to call her when she was a toddler.

When Caroline and Della, my two younger sisters, were toddlers we used to play a driving game (some might say torture) that I invented for them. An American group called The Playmates had had a hit with a song called Beep Beep a few years earlier in 1958. It was a silly little ditty about a small car racing a big Cadillac. The tempo of the song got faster and faster as the song went on (accelerando and presto as the musically minded might say), until by the last verse The Playmates were really motoring. Imagine them quacking away in New York Bronx accents ‘So, now we're going a hundred twenty as fast as I can go. The Rambler pulled along side of me as if we were going slow. The fella rolled down his window and yelled for me to hear "Hey buddy how do I get this car outa second gear?"

I seem to remember that the game consisted of my two sisters running around a small obstacle course that I’d built in our living room, and being required to jump over carefully positioned stools, plastic leatherette pouffes, and the occasional unguarded electric fire (well it was the sixties). My part in the game was song-master, singing the words of the song in increasingly fast-paced accelerando, and as I speeded up the pace of my singing forced them to go faster and faster, until one of them would make a slip, fall over, and start to snivel.

Yes, voice activated exercise was the stuff of games back when The Playmates were racing their Caddie against that Rambler. My two sisters seemed to enjoy the Beep Beep game though, and to add to their enjoyment I sometimes insisted that they race and jump with both hands placed firmly on their heads, a kind of hands-free, voice activated, driving game.

Talking of hands-free driving - here's me, the hands-free kid, driving around and around whilst paying absolutely no attention to the steering wheel, a habit that remains with me to this day. I wonder where I’m going and how fast I’m going there - a hundred, a hundred and ten, a hundred and twenty maybe? That’s my sister Caroline copying me in the car behind, she was always a copy cat and such a big cry baby.

Okay then, who fancies a game of Beep Beep? I’ll drive.