Out on the road with the elves and EVs

This alarming, and for men flinch-making and eye-watering idea has a special relevance for gentlemen of the ACT because the ever-progressive ACT is leading the nation in the per-head-of-population uptake of EVs.

Earlier this week Access Canberra calculated that there were 2627 battery EVs registered in the ACT with the number increasing every day.

One imagines that at least half of these EV purchases are being made by men who are either unaware of or are recklessly ignoring US congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene's accusation that the adoption of EVs "emasculates the way we drive".

MTG's now-famous diatribe on this theme, addressed to a pro-Trump rally, is freely available on YouTube and is an exciting and intellectually-stimulating entertainment.

"What could be more American than the roar of a V8 engine under the hood of a Ford Mustang or a Chevy Camiro! The incredible feel of all that horsepower!" the far-right congresswoman enthuses, going on to make her now famous assertion that EVs emasculate their drivers.

And of course it is not only Americans who like to have cars with engines that roar. Every day out on ACT roads in my little, petrol-driven car (it cannot roar and only ever murmurs) I find myself mingling with cars that not only roar but that snarl and bellow as well.

I have (when I was younger and more dashing) owned cars that roared, and even today would say, in semi-agreement with MTG, that the ear that is deaf to the music of a V8 engine singing its well-tuned heart out is probably an ear that is deaf to all gladsome sounds, perhaps even to Pavarotti and to the Australian magpie at their most full-throated.

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But, unlike MTG, I can see that, now, the ownership of petrol-driven cars that make thrilling jungle noises has become irresponsible - that for our planet's sake it may be time for us to try to turn to cars that only make electrical whispers and murmurs.

Meanwhile, though, we can surely grieve just a little over how the sound of a car engine of irresponsibly mighty mustang-power is set to become, like the moo and boom of mighty 19th-century foghorns, like the evocative percussion of carriage wheels and horses' hooves on cobbled streets, another of our civilisation's lost sounds.

Dwelling on MTG's remarks (for the far-right conspiracy theorist has a way of wriggling herself into one's thoughts) I begin to see that kind of car I like to drive now (my roaring days of roaring cars far behind me) is already an expression of my (figuratively) emasculated, increasingly-pronounced feminine side.

I drive a 1-litre VW Up! that is so emasculatingly dainty, elfin and girly that out on the road big, hairy, masculine cars openly, roaringly sneer at it.

But we should all drive cars that match our personalities and my petite VW is just the car for a shy, diffident man like me (if I am manly enough to deserve the label "man") who numbers flower-arranging and poetry-reading among his major passions in life.

Meanwhile another of my unmanly passions is reading literary fiction. All research shows that few men can be bothered with such a girly waste of time.

The Guardian, in its story Without women the novel would die reports that "Women are fiction's life support system - buying 80 per cent of all novels."

I mention this so as to explain the (not unattractive) pale pink blush you see on my usually ivory cheek.

It is there because when the awarding of the Nobel Prize in Literature was announced last week that awardee, Frenchwoman Annie Ernaux, was someone I had never even heard of.

Some sorts of ignorance of names and stations cause one no shame whatsoever.

So for example my hardly knowing any of the names of the mediocrities on Peter Dutton's shadow frontbench and my only knowing the name of one of the Canberra Liberals in the ACT Assembly (and even that one name escapes me for the moment) does not lose me a wink of sleep.

But then to be a devoted reader of fine writing and yet to be ignorant of so grand a writer who has been around and writing for yonks (Annie Ernaux is 82 and published her first book in 1974) seems unforgivably, blush-makingly shameful.

Shocked at my philistinism and pig-higgerance and anxious to right this wrong, within minutes of hearing the news of Ernaux's Nobel I had used the magic, the witchcraft of the eBook phenomenon to buy some of her books. The purchased eBooks whooshed down from the clouds (or from wherever in Literary Wonderland the eBooks are eWharehoused) and into my welcoming tablet.

That very day, anxious to fill the pothole of my shame at my ignorance of Ernaux with the asphalt of knowledge (I use this imagery advisedly, knowing that for Canberrans potholes are for the moment the most important issue in your narrow, bourgeois lives) I began and finished two of Ernaux's smaller books. I have since moved on to others, quite seeing why the Nobel committee has chosen to celebrate her for what it calls "the courage and clinical acuity with which she uncovers the roots, estrangements and collective restraints of personal memory".

Does the reading of literary literature, like the driving of EVs, emasculate a man? If so, gentlemen, let us embrace these culture-supporting, planet-assisting (virtual) eunuchuries with pride.