I came across this just a few days ago. I was checking for (any) precedent for an expression I learnt at school (as you will see at the end of this blog). “The Wheels Come Off” means “things go disastrously wrong; a situation devolves into ruin or chaos” which we can use these days for just about everything in the news these days. Politics, climate change, you name it – was it ever as bad as it is now?
Yes, but we focus on the now, as ever forgetting the past. And no, I am not going to repeat what you also have read in the news this week. The “now” has much to enjoy in fact. Tomorrow I and possibly hundreds of others celebrate the first birthday of Bobbie, my first grandchild. What a joy she is! And she together with her generation inherits a world so far from the one I first enjoyed. My first (eleven) years were in a sleepy mid-England village for which I am O so grateful. Then six or more years in Norfolk, just as sleepy before my eight years in Leeds. Step by step I moved from rural bliss to the “real world”. Bobbie already lives in a city (OK The Hague is also a little quiet) and kids today seem very able to handle city life and all it brings.
So why the title to this blog? Back to Norfolk and my years at Hamonds Grammar School in Swaffham. Some of my classmates were both ingenious and amusing. Every day a master would use a complicated word which, at the time, we did not understand. Then one of my mates came up with the expression “I used to have one of them but the wheels came off”!
Bobbie, be happy and enjoy this world. Don’t worry about the wheels!
dickwife 