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Another shoe day today, even though I already had one on Friday evening. This one was for Nicky's cousin's dizygotic twins' religiosifications, also requiring a suit and tie and having to stand in a church listening to people lie to each other for an hour or so and during which the wingpiglet dived forwards in pursuit of the toy monkey he'd just thrown at the floor and nutted the bit the books of untruths and sung-untruths rest upon, though he has so far not come up with a visible bruise anywhere and was only traumatised enough to sob once after the thunk's echoes had decayed away. We'd arrived slightly late and so had to walk down from the business end, squeezing in amongst unknown people including one slightly glarey woman who seemed to be alternating glaring at Edgar for making slightly disruptive babbles once every few minutes, glaring at me for not singing or bowing my head and apparently smiling at Nicky, if we're both thinking of the same woman. Behind us was a bloke exhibiting almost perfect random off-key register-switching during the hymns with greater ranges at whom the glaring-woman did not appear to want to glare, despite the potential for unseemly mirth thereby created. Despite the slipperiness of the frosty sloping path from church door to pavement all the many codgers in attendance appeared to survive passing down it which gave me a bit more confidence in having to do so in stupid shoes whilst carrying a wriggling baby.

Having had no need to drive over the past two months I had so far managed to avoid driving Nicky's new large car until the way home today, when we swapped just this side of Glasgow. I'd previously only sat in the driving seat for a few minutes last week when attempting to shift it a couple of feet backwards so that it didn't protrude past the end of the house, giving up when it didn't appear to want to come unstuck from the ice. I learnt to drive in a Micra (during lessons) and a Prairie (fambly-car at the time) which, despite the size difference, felt very similar. Though the Prairie was quite big the reasonably upright driving position, square corners and thin pillars meant that all the corners were visible. All the windows could be seen through and all the controls felt like they were mechanically linked to the thing they controlled. This thing seems to be full of blind spots caused by rounded, sloping pillars and lumps of plastic. The gearstick seems to hardly move and feels like it's not aligned with the normal front-rear axis, the clutch pedal has a lot of travel and lots of space whereas the brake bites almost immediately but is far too close to the accelerator, which also has a bit of delay built into its motion. The steering-wheel feels quite bus-like, held flat in front like a plate rather than parallel to the body like the nervously-gripped hat of an apprehensive Mexican in a western. Whilst the previous car was conveniently and thoughtfully small it occasionally proved a little too small to sit in comfortably for long periods, but the occasional bit of knee-ache (or hip-ache, if the weird twinge I developed last winter was anything to do with driving down to my parents') after a rare long journey would be much preferable to the horrible disconnected-from-the-road feeling of the big car. Also, the wingpiglet doesn't seem to like being in the back in the dark and will wail unless he can be persuaded to sleep. Unfortunately, there is no manual off switch for the passenger-side airbag.