I also took very seriously the injunction to be observant at all times, self-consciously & self-importantly reminding myself of this duty every time I left the house.
I was particularly stirred by the idea that I might achieve the status of vital witness, should I observe & remember the registration number of a car which turned out to have been involved in a crime – with so few cars on the road, especially in a rural area, the idea of being able to commit to memory the number of each that you saw was not totally daft, & the numbers of ‘wanted’ cars were regularly broadcast on the BBC news or published in the newspaper.
Registration plates had also acquired extra interest for me because of what they could tell you about where the car came from; each county, still responsible for car registration in the days before we had a national agency, had allocated to it several 2-letter combinations. A third letter plus 2 or 3 digits made up the rest of the identifier of the individual car. We knew that the letters for Derbyshire were RA, RB, RC or NU.
Games involved in spotting cars from different counties could help to while a way long car journeys - the AA Members Handbook (passed on to us by a Great Aunt when as each new year's version was sent to members) contained a list of all these 2-digit county codes.
However my career as Super Observant Girl Detective soon ran into a major snag: it is impossible to observe more than one thing at once, & while you concentrate on memorising the number (as well as the make & colour) of one car, you might, even on a quiet country road, know nothing of the details of one or more other cars which passed.
Nor could you simultaneously be observing & noting which birds were flying, or what the clouds in the sky might be telling you about the weather prospects, or which trees were there. And although I never had much faith in learning to track animals or humans by the traces they left, I couldn’t even take simultaneous care to look where I was going, to avoid falling down that hole, tripping over that tree branch, or walking into that patch of nettles.
And no time at all for just thinking my own thoughts.
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