License plates

hear me out

My young daughter (12) wears a tee-shirt that says “Riz’m with your Tizm”, which translated from Yoof apparently means “your autism is your charisma.” I am glad to have lived long enough for mild neurodivergence to be considered an asset. In the UK, a free autism assessment on the National Health has a three year waiting list, and a private one costs thousands if you’re in a hurry, so I’ve never been properly assessed. However, I score high on all the online tests.

This, in retrospect, may explain a few things. I’ve many times been told, “Oh, you must meet X, you guys would get on great,” only to find out X was decidedly on some spectrum, though we did get on. I am one of the few people of my acquaintance who prefers video and phone calls to in-person meetings, for thinking fast and getting a point across, simply because there are fewer distractions. I’ve never been able to shut out extraneous information, especially words. Wherever I am, I am constantly mouthing to myself every inscription I see—Stationnement Toléré, Pensione Villa Felice, Ενοικιάζεται, пельмени—and end up knackered by nightfall.

License plates, that endless supply of inscriptions, have always played a big part in my life. I remember as an adolescent walking past parked cars along the promenade of an English seaside town, arm-in-arm with a girl I had met in a night-club. I thought I’d impress her by making a pun on each three-letter license plate. Thirty cars later she was impressed, but I never saw her again.

There was in those days something zoological about license plates. Seeing a foreign plate while in France or Italy was like encountering a car of a different species, something like a Fiat hungarica or Mercedes gallica. A foreign license plate on an ordinary car was like an extra pair of decorative feathers on a rare subspecies of a common bird. Even a rickety Simca 1000 would be ennobled by bearing a license plate from a tiny enclave like Liechtenstein (FL) or San Marino (RSM).

The first two letters of Italian license plates used to indicate the province: TO for Torino, MI for Milan, etc. This had several advantages. First, you could always attribute whatever erratic driving the car exhibited to its province of origin, as in, “Those Genovesi [GE] can’t drive,” etc. Second, it helped you learn the way Italians spell things on the phone, so that Luca becomes Livorno-Udine-Como-Ancona. Roma alone was spelled out fully on plates, as befits a capital. The rare species were EE (Esportazione Estera) for people who bought a car in Italy during temporary residence, and PROVA, the plates you would see near Modena or Bologna, screaming past, affixed to Ferraris or Lamborghinis out for a test.

National plates had personalities. The French ones were still hammering home the fact that centuries-old regions of France had been erased on February 26, 1790, and replaced with Départements, each named after some river within it. This act of senseless brutality lives on as the last two license plate numbers: 75 for Paris, 06 for Alpes Maritimes, etc. The fact that you had to remember the numbers to figure out where the car came from was very French, and the drabness of the plate added up to a faithful emanation of the short-back-and-sides government official.

British plates were in my childhood up to three letters and three numbers, frequently silver on a black background, slightly larger than usual, with a hangdog solemnity that worked best on battered Jags and Rovers. Plates in the UK can be bought and sold separately from the car, and in fashionable places, you could encounter the upper echelons in the form of early plates like RR 1, or more recently punning plates like ORG 45M, worth more than the car itself. It almost goes without saying that crawling in traffic along the crowded Saint Tropez harbor front, past the bars en terrasse, with one of those plates or, better still, one from California, was the stuff of pure Riz.