The more things change ...
I HAD a real taste of culture shock recently. Oh, never mind being accosted by a snappily dressed svelte young African woman in a Johannesburg shopping centre who babbled on incomprehensibly to me for several seconds, then looked at me as though I was dumb until I clicked.
Portuguese. She was an Angolan visiting Johannesburg and did not speak any of our 11 official languages. She just wanted to know the time. I responded in Italian. We had a real conversation. How bizarre.
But the culture shock came from Aura. She was riding on my shoulders at the time on our way to the hairdresser.
And after our haircuts, I helped myself to a balloon from the display in the front window and handed it to her as a reward for sitting quietly through the snipping.
She got all excited. "Look, Kanthan! It's a magic balloon!"
Oh? There was nothing extraordinary about the balloon as far as I could see. It was basic black with the hairdresser's logo on the side. "Why is it a magic balloon, Aura?"
"Because look! It doesn't go up! It stays on the floor!"
The penny dropped. Aura has had lots of balloons in her three-and-a-bit years, but most of them have been helium filled.
She would usually play happily with the balloon until she let go of the string. It would then rise to the ceiling out of her reach and a wail of despair would follow.
Now she had a balloon that would not get away. It would follow her about at the end of its string like a puppy on a leash. That's why it was magical.
I didn't see my first helium balloon until I was about 10 years old. I thought that was magical.
Technological changes pass by so quickly that the impact they have made on our lives gets forgotten. I know of people in their twenties who look upon my reel-to-reel tape deck in astonishment. "Is that a big cassette deck?" they ask. I shudder at the thought of showing them the reels of wire recordings made by my father in the 1950s.
A friend of mine sent me a related bit of trivia. The US standard railroad gauge the distance between the rails is 4 feet, 8.5 inches (or 1,44m for those who have never met the old Imperial measures). That's an exceedingly odd number.
Why is that gauge used? Because that's the way they built them in England, and the US railroads were built by English ex-pats.
Why did the English build 'em like that? Because the first rail lines were built by the same people who built the pre-railroad tramways, and that's the gauge they used.
Why did they use that gauge then? Because the people who built the tramways used the same jigs and tools as they used for building wagons, which used that wheel spacing.
So why did the wagons use that wheel spacing? Well, if they tried to use any other spacing the wagons would break on some of the old, long distance roads, because that's the spacing of the ruts.
So who built these old rutted roads? The first long distance roads in Europe were built by Imperial Rome for the benefit of their legions. The roads have been used ever since.
And the ruts? The initial ruts, which everyone else had to match for fear of breaking their wagons, were first made by Roman war chariots. Since the chariots were made by or for Imperial Rome they were all alike in the matter of wheel spacing (ruts again).
Thus we have the answer to the original question. The United States standard railroad gauge of 4ft 8.5in derives from the original military specification for a Roman army war chariot.
Another acquaintance added: "I showed this to my wife, medieval studies major and horsewoman, who points out that the spacing of wheels on the Roman chariot was like as not dictated by the width of the yoke that attached the chariot to the horse, and the need to keep the wheel ruts well out of the path of the loose earth the hooves are kicking up.
"Thus, the gauge of the Iron Horse might be in fact derived from the width of the standard Roman war horse."
What this has to do with balloons, I really don't know. But does anyone out there still have a working wire recorder? I've got some reels I'd like to listen to.