Andrew Miller: Classic car chases educate a child’s mind in ways the classroom just can’t

This column, in fine dad tradition, pretends to contain lessons — but not “learnings” a word which should be banned except from the hellscape of LinkedIn where it is a reliable indicator of content you can skip.

I was supposed to be helping the six-year-old with reading practice, but we got distracted and ended up watching classic car chases on YouTube.

Specifically, comparing and contrasting wanton automotive carnage in the movies The Italian Job and The Blues Brothers.

This naturally led to explaining the historical relevance of the Illinois Nazis — who met their demise by driving off an incomplete flyover while pursuing Jake and Elwood Blues — and why popular culture so often circles back to the dark risks of fascism.

Nazis famously lost the war through over-reach but, as with measles and polio, modern versions persist, and we remain vigilant.

Many problems endure — right-wing extremism; infectious diseases; hospital over-crowding, and politicians dumb or artful enough to argue that legalising bare-knuckle fighting might somehow be wise.

We then discussed the actor Henry Gibson, who played the Illinois Nazi leader — beloved for his quirky, subversive flower poetry on Laugh-In and for voicing Wilbur in the wonderful 1973 movie Charlotte’s Web.

If this sort of education is not what fathers are good for, then I give up.

She liked the Mini Coopers in the Italian Job, so we pulled up the online car ads.

After our recent epic road trip from Perth to Broome, we visited Carol and Dave Berger’s place then flew home.

They have recently completed higher studies at the School of Tropical Medicine and Global Health in Nagasaki, Japan.

Never ones to shy away from an intriguing intellectual or geographic diversion, they are the sort of positively inquisitive doctors you want puzzling over your hospital bed — setting ever higher standards for themselves and taking your diagnosis and recovery personally.

Berger has been sending me new insights on many infectious diseases that we have been battling since antiquity.

Diseases whose prevention we must continually take seriously, or they will creep back into our lives — as measles is doing in the besieged USA.

Meanwhile, their anything-but-serious Health Secretary’s department apparently used AI to author his flagship Make America Healthy Again report, complete with multiple fake references.

Any decent university would expel lowly students for trying that nonsense.

My reliably logical wife pointed out that the grand Broome adventure has put an impractical distance between me and my only car.

She also accurately illustrated, with the weather radar, that it is not an ideal season to be bike and scooter dependent.

Serious precipitation is no issue at all in plastic pants and jacket, but raging storm fronts are not ideal conditions for two wheels at the school pickup.

Luckily, I still subscribe to an old-fashioned paper magazine about automobiles, as part of my failing digital detox.

Reading about how the resistance to electric vehicles has fallen is fascinating.

They could range much further if simply made less powerful, but yet another perennial problem the human race revisits is that the adoption of positive developments can easily be sabotaged by the male ego.

Ergo, electric cars must accelerate faster — much faster — than petrol ones, or no fluffy dice.

We found an ad for a 1978 Leyland Mini coupe — “Needs work. No tyre kickers.”

It will go for around $3,000, which is simply a deposit on future repairs, but it oozes Michael Caine character: “You were only supposed to blow the bloody doors off!”

I explained to her that scenes with Minis racing through running water are misleading, because of the anterior placement of Leyland distributors.

Even light showers would more often result in roadside spraying of WD-40 on the sodden electrics, than thrilling escapes from the Carabinieri en route to school.

“Are there really Illinois Nazis?” she asked.

“Yeah, I think so” I replied, “but we’ve beaten them before, and we can do it again.”