CARS I HAVE OWNED

CARS I HAVE OWNED

My first car was a Ford Escort

In Electric Blue, Mark One –

They’re quite trendy now

My mum and dad

Bought it for me

The April before

My eighteenth birthday

One month after

Passing my test

It had no rear demister

The radio was

Bought by my sister

You could open it with

A half-pence piece

Full of forgotten friends

It covered many miles

That one summer

And, Boy! Could it shift

Spun it into the back

Of a builder’s yellow Passat

My second car was a Ford Cortina

In Navy Blue, Mark Three

Like the one in “The Sweeney”

It saw me through college

Back and forth

To South Wales

Until I was twenty-two

James the guitarist

Welded it better

One memorable summer

My German teacher

Once told us that they

Were ahead of their time

I once flung a hammer

At the ground

In a car park

Whilst fixing its radiator

When unemployed

I couldn’t afford to fix it

So it got scrapped

My third car was a Ford Capri

In ghastly beige, Mark Two –

With a brown vinyl roof

And a jacked-up

Rear axle

My sister found it for me

And my mum paid for it

I was still on the dole

It had a duff starter motor

Shortly after I got it

I parked it outside

A friend’s house and

Someone backed into its door

I went to a scrapyard

And got replacement doors

Drove it to Warrington

Where it was supposed

To be repaired

I never saw it again -

I only had it a month

Then I had another Cortina

In bright orange, a Mark Five

Though people tell me

It was salmon pink -

And use of a white Fiesta

Though that belonged

To the woman

I lived with at that time

She left me to move in with

A bloke with a white Capri -

Four years and more I had

A crimson Scirocco, Mark Two

It got written off

By a Dutch lorry

One evening on the A6 -

So I bought a useless Rover

Back from Cornwall

It devoured petrol

And the engine seized

Within a few weeks

I shared a diesel Fiesta

In burnished gold

With the woman whose

House I lodged in for a while -

Moving out, I got myself

A little red Volvo

Three-something-something

Which lasted a while -

My colleagues dubbed it

“Clunky the Wonder Car” -

And then a red Volvo Four-

Something-something replaced it

We called that “Clunky Too” -

Since then I have driven

“Blinky the Wonder Car” -

So-called because

Its bulbs kept blowing -

And the car we call “New Car”

Even though I’ve driven

It for five years now

Martin A W Holmes, September 2016 

INTERLUDE (2) - GREAT BIG TRUCKS

Back in the 1970s, and earlier, American cars had the - not undeserved -  reputation of being huge, vast, yes, let's face it, massive blocks of steel which trundled along the Freeways guzzling gas as the great American dream was utterly and totally fulfilled for several generations.

If you still watch any of those old TV popular shows from the 1970s, you'll still be able to see them turning corners in precisely the same way supertankers don't and looking about as aerodynamic as bricks during the car chases, and bouncing over the rocks and gravel in a most undignified manner with all of that right angled bodywork with their endless hoods and trunks and muddy colours.

Still, times changed, and with the "Gas Crisis" of the mid-to-late 1970s, suddenly those nippy little "Compact" cars that had been the source of such derision suddenly started to look like a more sensible option, and were embraced so much by the American driver that, when you drive around nowadays, the roads generally look very different.

In other words they look much the same in terms of what's driven upon them as any other major city in the world, and the "Big American Car" is seldom seen. That said, I did spot an old  Cadillac station wagon parked at the side of a road in Santa Cruz and it certainly gave the impression of being nearly half a block long, which was always kind of the point with those cars, given that they were built in a huge country which had wide open Freeways to get the people around.

To the British mind, however, the so-called "Gas Crisis" was always a bit of a myth, given that, even twenty years ago, about twenty years on from the "Crisis", you could fill up your car for about ten dollars when you were paying three or four times that price back home.

Still, I suppose that if you're used to petrol being dirt cheap, hiking up the prices to merely cheap might still come as a bit of a shock. Interestingly, the price of petrol is still a bit of a hot topic in conversations you have with Americans when travelling around.

When we were (eventually) signing our Car Rental agreement, we decided to go with the "buy a full tank, return it empty" option because they were offering a "reasonable rate" of $3.80 a gallon when we might pay $4.30 or more at a Gas Station. When you tell them that you're paying about $2.00 a litre back home, or about $8.00 to $9.00 a gallon, they look amazed and genuinely wonder if anyone bothers actually driving any more.

Which brings me around to the great big trucks, because nowadays you see them absolutely everywhere, dominating the car parks of the motels and malls, and dwarfing many of the more ordinary cars on the Highways and Freeways.

You'll have seen them on the streets of the UK, too... usually driven by tiny young mothers doing the school run and, whilst they look ridiculous over here, they kind of fit into the American landscape rather well, certainly as the vehicle of choice for the working man, or anyone who has to travel any distance, even though the lights are far too high off the ground so that they blind you if they happen to pull up behind you in evening traffic.

Now, because I live somewhere that suffers from the cold in winter, I drive a rather small, four-wheel drive vehicle called a "Rav-4" at home, and you do see  those from time-to-time in American traffic and they look tiny in comparison to these massive, massive trucks, and yet I know just how expensive it is to run my tiny little Rav, just as I know how many pounds it takes to fill up one of those bigger trucks, given that I had a colleague who once had one and who turned an alarming shade of puce the first time he went to the petrol station.

Politically, of course, the price of gas is a hot topic in the US, and is possibly the thing most likely to topple Presidents, given that it effects everybody all of the time, and when you're stretching a budget, even the ridiculously low prices they pay might seem huge if they double in a very short time.

But they'll all still continue to buy those massive, massive trucks… perhaps because it feels like a symbol of their masculinity, or a status symbol, or perhaps just because the national understanding is still the belief that Americans should be driving great big vehicles, even if they must then complain endlessly about the cost of the fuel that you need to put in them…

Odd country...

SCRAPINGS

It's that slightly alarming scraping sound of metal upon metal which first worries you...

A slight underlying noise as I shifted gear heading up the hill on my way home. That slight scraping which reminded me slightly of the noise a CD makes when it's not quite properly sitting in the tray of one of the cheaper "top-loading" players, if you're familiar with the concept.

It sounded as if it might be coming from the gearbox although, given that it was most noticeable during a gear change, it might well be coming from the clutch...

Or it might just be all in my imagination (shun, shun, shun...)

Either way, it seemed as if a - presumably expensive - pre-Christmas trip to the garage might be in order.

Then, on one particular morning, I did wake up pondering upon my fluid levels. I mean, I often do that, but this time I was thinking about the car. The sound might simply be, I reasoned, because the brake and clutch fluid were getting rather low but, given that it was serviced a mere two months ago, that seemed highly unlikely unless a leak had developed and a leak, of course, also would mean that a visit to see a trained mechanic would be necessary anyway.

It's like taking a reluctant dog to see the vet.

You put it off for as long as you can, but...

Of course after trying to ignore the - admittedly intermittent - noise for the better part of a fortnight, I finally caved in on my day off and popped over to the garage which, rather naturally couldn't hear the noise at all because it refused point blank to manifest itself as we drove up and down the road on a "demonstration run" trying to make it do what I claimed it was doing.

Naturally, as I drove away again, a huge scraping noise erupted as I changed gear from second into third but, obviously, like that proverbial tree in the forest, it didn't happen because there wasn't a mechanic around to hear it.

The garage was, of course, "snowed under" with work this week anyway, so it was unlikely that they'd have been able to schedule it in for me even if I'd insisted, although I did decide to book it in for a check-up next week anyway.

Oh well, they assured me that it wasn't likely to be much of a problem and I scuttled off back to my life hoping against all hope that it would, at least, make it through the week.

After all, this time of year really is not a good one to be left in a transportless state, although, like everything in life, there really is never a good time, is there...?

HOLE IN THE GROUND

Absolutely everywhere

It’s that time of year when the sun comes out, the excavating machines are taken out of mothballs, the contractors dust off their hard hats, slip on their fluorescent tops, work boots and gravitationally over-active jeans and set out to dig holes in the roads.

Suddenly, on any journey I have to take anywhere, there are roadworks, roadworks everywhere, where recently there were none, and I’m beginning to think that it can’t be a coincidence.

It’s as if, during the rainy and icy months, there’s nothing at all wrong with the pothole-marked crusts we move around upon, and the road workers all hibernate in the little stripy tents that they construct for themselves, drinking tea, playing cards and comparing tattoos, and then, there’s a glint of sunlight in the air and the cones are out, the temporary traffic lights are tested to make sure they are all set to “red” and, like those tiny little workers in the “Snow White” story, “hi-hoh, hi-hoh”, it’s off to work they go.

Well, off to somewhere, anyway…

The cones are there, the machinery is there, the lights are on red and there’s nobody home, except for some road users trying to work out whether the contra-flow is clear enough to risk a head on collision with the traffic coming from the other direction and which will be wondering thinking exactly the same thing.

And so, you carefully manoeuvre your way around one hole in the ground, relax and tootle along on a bright sunny morning, only to find there’s another one half a mile up the road and another, and another, and each time you go through the same routines, relieved in a way that it’s early enough that there’s not yet much traffic about and also thinking, with increasing dread, about the journey home.

You might be heading different direction, but it’s the same set of holes and, even if you manage to avoid the tail end of the “school run” you’ll have slipped into the “rush hour” instead and you begin to wonder whether you’ll ever see that warm bed you so recently vacated ever again as you continually hold the car on the clutch, no doubt chipping even more of the notches off the cogs in your overworked gearbox.

They seem to pop up at random, too, almost as if they’ve slipped through from some alternate  “roadworks fixated” universe, designed to snarl up the free-flow of movement in our world and so not have to face the ignominy of winning the “Most Tetchy Version of Reality” award for the umpteenth year in succession.

Not only that, but these holes in the ground, or – possibly - routes to adventure (which might explain where the contractors actually are…), always seem to appear at the most inconvenient spot - the three-way junction, the blind corner or the only route to town - and never where that huge pothole causes you to swerve out of the way and into the path of the traffic coming the other way on the one morning in three that you remember in advance that it’s actually there before you feel that familiar clunk as you hit it full tilt.

I know, like my journeys, they are a “strictly necessary” evil, as things do, unfortunately, still fall apart in our own “entropic” universe. Perhaps we need to work out a way of sending our entropy over to “roadworks world” as a kind of big “thank you” for all the joy they’ve given to us over the years…?

Sometimes a hole in the ground becomes necessary because the water pipe they dug up the road to mend last month has leaked and damaged the nearby electricity feed, or corroded the gas pipe, or interfered with the optical cabling, and you can feel pretty sure that once one part of your journey has been has been dug up, the same spot will be getting dug up fairly regularly for the next few years, and, even when the autumn clouds have started to gather and the roadworks have all gone back to sleep for another winter, you know that, even as you sail across that new laid tarmac that somehow never manages to quite match the road surface around it, one day you’ll be greeting it again like an old friend.

The kind of old friend that you really wish wouldn’t keep coming around and stealing all of the beer from out of your fridge.

OIL STATS

They were talking about the earth's oil reserves on the radio a few days ago and, whilst I can't remember the exact statistics, the conversation went something like this:

We know where all the "easy-to-get-at" oil is, and we're pretty certain that we know how much of it there is, how much of it there ever will be, and whilst oil companies are now working on extracting the more "difficult-to-get-at" oil, the basic quantities of what we've actually got of this finite substance have pretty much always been known, and, whilst the number of probable barrels can be measured in the trillions, we're pumping the stuff out at an incredible rate and, let's be honest, there's nothing much that's going to be replacing the stuff any time soon.

So, given that we know how much of it there is, give or take a trillion or two, of all those trillions upon trillions of gallons of oil there ever will be in the world ever, it took us 150 years to completely use the first quarter of it up.

Then, apparently, using up the second quarter took 22 years.

Now you don't have to be an expert in exponential mathematics to see where that one is heading.

Now obviously I'm no expert but if the second quarter took slightly less than a sixth of the time to use up than the first, and you extrapolate that exponentially, the third quarter could be used up an as little as two years, and the remainder in a couple of months, if you want to paint a really alarming picture.

In other words, buy a new car today and you might struggle to fuel it before it ever needs an MOT certificate...

Obviously, it's not going to happen quite that quickly, but parts of the world are currently chewing the stuff up, or, putting more politely consuming it, like there's no tomorrow, which, when it comes to supplies of it, there really isn't...

I always kind of assumed that I'd be driving at least until I retired, but with the way everyone's finances are currently wobbling (well, everyone except the filthy rich, anyway...), and with the laws of supply and demand being what they are, I'm kind of thinking that I'll be resorting to the old "horse and cart" option before very much longer, if they don't get those alternative sources of energy sorted out pretty soonish...

Although, even those battery powered vehicles still have to be manufactured, as indeed do the batteries themselves, and I'm kind of assuming that it's the oil that powers much of the machinery that's used to make the things and dig up the stuff that's used to make those as well.

So whichever way, it seems that we're totally screwed...

CLOBBERED

I had to pay the car tax again last weekend and, whilst it doesn’t seem five minutes since the last renewal, I was rather more shocked at the hefty wallop my bank account was getting from the numbers the direct.gov website was suggesting that I ought to hand over to them that I thought I’d better check that there hadn’t been some kind of mistake.

So there I was, strolling down to the road on a Sunday afternoon to have a quick look at the old tax disc on the windscreen of the increasingly inaccurately named “new” car, just to see whether I’d paid out a similar amount last year or my car had been shifted into a more unfriendly band of duty, when my neighbour intercepted me.

Now, I’m not generally the most “chatty” of folk, but if someone’s already outside, we’ll pass the time of day and chat a little, so this isn’t all that unusual, especially as he was outside doing some of those little bits of outdoor maintenance – clearing the cracks in the paving stones of new moss – that I somehow always fail to get around to as much as I ought to, and so I made a jovial comment about how he was making me feel guilty…

Ho, bloody ho…!

Anyway, he asked me whether I’d seen my car, which is never the best of opening gambits, and proceeded to tell me that he noticed that the back bumper had been scraped overnight and that he’d found a piece of bumper “From a VW Transporter…” lying in the road right behind where whatever collision it was had taken place.

There was also some comment about only one house on the row having such a vehicle, but I was prepared to let that one go for the time-being, given as proving it would be very difficult and it was just as likely to have been a taxi moving off or a pizza delivery van or even some passing Saturday night drunk.

In fact I was quite surprised at how calm I managed to remain, given that it was me, although I must admit that I was silently thinking about the laws of karma, inevitability and car parking regularly on the street, whilst being slightly grateful that I’d never been in the position to ever be able to afford a brand new BMW about which I might very well have been slightly more cross.

Anyway, I went and had a look, and he, in a very public-spirited moment, retrieved the fallen bumper out of his van and showed it to me, and indeed it was what he said it was. He also mentioned that his own car had suffered similar damage a couple of times since he’d been parking it there and we grumbled amiably about it being the nature of not having private off-road parking.

The scrape itself looked quite bad but was only on one of the more plastic parts of my venerable vehicle, and so I decided that it was unlikely to rust and muttered something about retouching it, even though I know that I probably will never get around to it. I made some light-hearted quip about my neighbour now being able to extort the other neighbour, checked that my road tax had indeed been just as extortionate last year (which, give or take a tenner, it had been), and we chatted about other things before I headed back indoors to spread the cheery news.

Later on, in the spirit of good neighbourly relations, he knocked upon my front door just as we were taking a break from that evening’s movie, to tell me that it definitely wasn’t my other neighbour who had clobbered my car, presumably so that I wouldn’t go around pointing the finger and shouting “J’accuse!” at an innocent party.

Granted, being so averse to confrontation, this was highly unlikely, but still, it’s good that such potentially embarrassing spectacles were avoided.

How he knew this for certain, of course, implies that further investigation had taken place and that he had taken far more interest in the incident which is, perhaps, what I ought to have done. In fact, I suspect that if he hadn’t knocked on, I might very well have forgotten all about it until I went out to get into my car and drive to work on Monday morning.

Mind you, it does at least prove to me that I actually have at least one good neighbour, and “new” car now has a lasting scar which will no doubt up its reputation as being one of the cooler kids in the neighbourhood when it hangs around on street corners with the other cars.

All that worries me now is someone else’s car getting clobbered in a car park near to mine, taking a look around and seeing that scrape, and thinking that it was me, because that could get pretty awkward giving as other people seem far less inclined towards avoiding confrontation these days than I do.

That and the fact that I can’t seem to keep anything nice any more…

A CAR WITH NO NAME

We’ve had “new car” for almost a year now. In fact we should stop calling it “new car” and perhaps just start calling it “car” I suppose, in the absence of anything better to call it. Anyway, in the post “Blinky” era, we never really came up with anything else to call it. The “Silver Bullet” would never have been appropriate and it is far, far too chunky to be called “Thunderbird One” even though the colour change would have been appropriate as a direct contrast to Blinky’s occasional alter-ego “Thunderbird Two” which it was given because of its dark green colouring and the regular trips made to the tip in a big “cargo container” like way.

“New” car has yet to be sullied with a filthy old trip to the tip. It’s leather seats seemed far too shiny and clean for that sort of thing, but given my general neglect of my vehicles in terms of their cleanliness, perhaps that day is looming. Perhaps such a fate has only been escaped because of the general laziness (or busy-ness… or rainy-ness) which has overtaken us over these past twelve months meaning that the house and garden have been chronically neglected and that kind of rubbish has not been accumulating in quite the same quantities as it once did.

So, having surprisingly survived a full twelve months in a relatively clean state in our company, “new”  car it remains, even though it was not exactly “new” when we bought it, having a good eight years on the clock when it fell into our nefarious and neglectful clutches. It was, of course, merely “new” to us, and that seems to have been the massively inappropriate monicker that it has come to be known by.

However, perhaps, after the past few weeks, I should just start calling it “cash cow” (at least as far an everyone else involved with it is concerned) as it seems to have caused a substantial amount of cash to have been drained from my dwindling resources, but I kind of think that to call it that would ultimately be rather mean, especially to any cattle which might overhear.

You see, the problem with approaching the anniversary of buying a car is that you also approach the time when its first MOT test becomes due, or at least the first one after you became the “registered keeper” or whatever the latest terminology might happen to be. This can be a costly affair and, coming as it did a mere three weeks after that other annual raid on the pocket of the motorist, the annual car insurance renewal, I am currently staring at the “Silver Streak” (No…) with a great deal of what can only be described as bitter, seething resentment.

A tractor by any other name
(Number plate concealed to protect the guilty)

Ironically, when I dropped “new” car off in the morning, I was actually offered a loan vehicle for the day, which was nice, even though it turned out to be a bit of an ex-farm-boy’s “battle tank” which had a gearbox which was akin to stirring porridge and an unpleasant habit of being just a little bit rubbish. Perhaps I would have been better off if they had offered me a tractor...? But I digress. I thought that, when he offered it to me, that he was trying to persuade me that the “Freelander” might be my option of choice whenever I was next considering a trade-in, but that was swiftly kyboshed when I asked him that. He told me that he hated them himself and another customer had rung him to say that hers would be arriving for its MOT test later on “on the back of an AA truck…”

So, I stirred this venerable vehicle through the wettest morning on record, carefully negotiating that hour most associated with the “school run” with frequent stops by the “lollipop guild” and the madness of all the mumsies and dadsies delivering their “little darlings” to their various educational establishments with little thought, it appeared, for their actual safety, given the number of doors swinging open into moving traffic, conversations being had over shoulders as the car was still moving, and the amount of simply running out into oncoming traffic that I witnessed going on.

How do so many of them survive it every day...?

By the time I got to work, what with that and all the porridge-stirring, I was knackered, and I was even more knackered by the return journey during the evening rush hour. I staggered back into the garage’s reception area almost pleading with them to take this monster off me and tell me that the “Silver Lady” (No…) was ready for collection.

Whilst I was relatively happy to be given a courtesy car for the day when it went in for its annual MOT test which I, perhaps unwisely, combined with a full service, in the end being given a loan vehicle for the day didn’t quite make up for the £541+ bill for my own car which I was presented with at the end of the day.

Strangely enough, the two main things that needed paying out for were both things that were not covered by the 1 year warranty that the “Silver Fox” (No…) was supposedly covered by. Tyres, you see are not “mechanical” (and, at the price they cost me, it felt as if they were selling me actual silver tyres to put on my silver car...), and brake discs (apparently) also aren’t covered, as they’re subject to normal “wear and tear”.

Funny that.

Oddly enough, I thought that, by replacing my own wiper blades a couple of weeks ago, I would have pretty much got it covered. It was, after all, “perfectly sound” a year ago, when I bought it. Unfortunately, it seems that I was travelling far, far too hopefully (which is unusual for me, as you’ll know…) by convincing myself of this, because there’s always, always something that you haven’t even thought of that just sitting there waiting to bite you in the wallet.

Sadly, I do seem to have a history of such things. I genuinely don’t believe that I’ve ever dropped a car off for its MOT test and come away with a bill of less than three hundred quid. It seems that, in my case at least, it’s almost become compulsory, although the extra two hundred on top of that seems to be setting a new precedent that I’d rather didn’t turn into a tradition if I can help it. Mind you, I do get the feeling that mechanics just have to see me walk in and they immediately dash off to book their holidays with the word “Jackpot” ker-ching-ing across their eyeballs…

Thankfully, (or at least relatively thankfully) I did manage to switch the annual tax to the other half of the year by forking out for twelve months after the initial six the garage which sold the “Silver Beast” (No…) to me and so at least I’m not having to face the “triple whammy” of MOT, Tax and Insurance all at the same time.

Small mercies, eh…?

UGLY CARS

I’m going to keep this brief today, as it’s more of a visual thing anyway, and, in the life of someone who still can albeit loosely describe themselves as “a designer”, it’s really not the done thing to criticise the work of other designers, especially when one’s own glass house is always prone to several severe public brick-chucking incidents.

Suffice it to say that, whilst I am a mere motorist, and not a car designer, I do consider myself to be a person who thinks that they might still have a little sense for what is aesthetically pleasing, especially when it comes to the things that are pleasant about our environment and the various adornments thereof, and, because of this, there are one or two cars that I see driven about (and parked) that, in my humble opinion (and possibly in mine alone) could be considered as bordering upon what I can only describe as being “ugly”.

I am sorry if the term is considered offensive nowadays, and in this modern era, when you have to be so very careful with the words you choose to describe pretty much anything. It is not a word that I have chosen lightly, but, nevertheless, that is the word I chose to use because that is very much the way I see these mechanical monstrosities.

You see, I have a new personal favourite candidate for the ugliest car in the world, after spotting one parked at the kerbside a few weeks ago. Actually, I considered it to be such a monstrosity when it flung itself out and wrenched at my disbelieving eyeballs that I almost managed to provide the late, lamented “Blinky, the Wonder Car” (and, incidentally, myself) with that final blaze of glory that I suspect that it probably so craved.

Exhibit "A"

“What was this visual anti-delight?”, I hear you ask, assuming of course that you haven’t sneaked a quick peek at exhibit “A”… It is, of course, the asymmetrical monstrosity that calls itself the Nissan Cube, to my mind the very first car for which I can honestly understand the label “boxy” actually working, after years of not really getting what the term was referring to when various of my favourites were thusly (and, I believe, undeservedly) labelled.

To spend 100 years perfecting aerodynamics and styling to almost an art form, and one which sometimes allows the likes of even Jeremy Clarkson to TURN his descriptive POWERS to SOMETHING almost APPROACHING poetry, and then throw away everything you ever learned and literally put a box on wheels just seems so very counter-intuitive that it really beggars belief. And then to actually call it a “Cube” is almost to just open up your flies and piss upon generation after generation of designers.

You might, I suppose, if you were feeling generous, perhaps consider such an act to be “Making a feature of it” as my old pal Laurence on the set-builder would once have said, but I’m not really feeling much generosity towards them, so I won’t, even though it might just have the hint of genius about it. After all, if you take a look at the current Nissan range, it is just possible that they have a whole post-modern “ugly” styling ethos going on. Or something...

After all, if you actually manage to sell a vehicle with all the aerodynamic styling of a housebrick to the gullible masses, you might very well be on to something. I personally might very well believe that the asymmetric quality of the offset back windows does it few favours, or that a car design based on a Lego brick was something that should remain in the nursery, but someone has obviously forked out good money for this, because I have seen one, parked on the very high street I drive along nearly every day, and it shamed my eyeballs so much that they left me a note requesting that I poke them out with a stick.

I didn’t of course, because that would be stupid, and would have left me unable to warn you good people about it.

I imagine that it was only meant to be a “city runabout” so I’m sure it fulfills that function very well, even though the one I saw (damn these eyes!) had patently escaped into the countryside instead of hiding in plain sight like it normally would, alongside the various skips and portaloos that it so resembles.

The previous "front-runner"

My previous front-runner, that mobile greenhouse known as the Fiat Multipla now seems to be a positive triumph by comparison, and I don’t mean a TR6, and, almost unbelievably, shoves the “push-me-pull-you” people carrier known as the Citroën Xsara into third place, which almost means that it is possibly, and somewhat incredibly, slowly starting to gain an air of respectability.

An "almost respectable" 3rd place

Incidentally, talking about Citroën, there is another way to save money, and it doesn’t involve encouraging people, however comedically, to steal petrol from other motorists by using their gymnastic little doggies… Mind you, with other televisual advertisements demonstrating the typical APR on payday loans at 1741%, perhaps the options are becoming more limited and we should start asking who’s robbing who…

And on that bombshell, goodnight and thanks for watching…

THE BIG RED MINI

It is a very strange phenomenon that when you really start to think about one thing, a whole raft of other memories can suddenly come to mind. This one particular photograph is a case in point. It is Christmas 1968, and the family are all staying at my grandparents’ house. The tiny potato-faced one is nearly four and a half years old and has just come face-to-face with his main present for that particular Christmas Day, a red plastic Mini that you could actually sit in and drive about the place.

This, it has turned out, was the only version of Alec Issigonis’s classic Mini car design that I have ever owned, well, apart from ones like the toy one I mentioned once getting around new year. Suddenly I’m noticing a slight trend in the pattern of gift giving here, which sadly never manifested itself with the “real thing” at a time when it would have been quite useful. I suppose that I’m being unfair there, because I did get bought a car shortly after I passed my test, a Mk1 Ford Escort in Electric Blue that cost about £300. It might not have been sparklingly new, and the brakes on the entire left side might have been a touch suspect, and you could open it with a half-pence piece, but it was a gift happily given and gratefully received.

Rather strangely, those early Escorts do seem to have become a bit iconic in recent years. I was in a craft shop recently, moping around the model kits whilst wool was being chosen, and amongst all the kits for making E-Type Jags and Ferraris, there were kits for that very Escort, a simple little family saloon from the early 1970s. Mine came to an ignominious end, colliding back-end to back-end with a Yellow VW Passat owned by a builder when those suspect brakes were tested rather too suddenly on a wet road and found wanting as the world slowly spun through about 135 degrees.

My friend Matthew at college used to drive a green Mini when he was occasionally allowed to borrow it during term time. It was a fine old classic from the pre-BL era with those rather funky horizontally sliding windows in the side doors, and a slight tendency to fling its wiper blades away at the worst possible moment. A later “sort of” girlfriend was also a bit of a fan of the Mini, and I fully expected her to take part in the annual owners’ club drive to Italy one year. It’s probably just as well that the relationship didn’t take, because four days in a Mini with me would probably have found her deciding to drive straight off the road and into a canyon.

So that’s pretty much my entire experience of the Mini car, apart from the one that the garage lent me once when Blinky was in for some major surgery. That was, however, one of the “new” ones and you had to start it by positioning something that looked like a tiny frying pan into the dashboard. It was an impressive car, but it just wasn’t the same.

The house we were all in on that long ago Christmas morning was called “The Hawthorns” and was a largish detached house built by my grandfather in the 1950s and (rather too) quickly sold by him 20 years later so that he could then go off and build their retirement bungalow. It seems odd to me now that a plumber would dabble in architecture, but I suppose that his various contacts in the trades and trade organisations helped to make it a slightly more feasible project for a tradesman to attempt. Oddly enough, I have few desires in that direction, finding even the prospect of having builders come to this ramshackle little place to do some much needed maintenance rather more than I can bear. Over the years, I have occasionally gone back and had a look at the place. The last time was admittedly quite a few years ago now, but it had been extended massively and the original house is all but buried within its new form. It looks as if some of the adjacent land has also been bought, as there is now a huge new driveway leading up to the house and so these days it resembles a tiny mansion. I do sometimes wonder whether the current owners might be interested in the construction photographs that I still have in a box (somewhere…), but I’m not really brave enough to go and knock on the door and ask them.

They might, after all, “release the hounds!”

My very first memories of having insomnia can be traced back to those Christmases in that house. I can recall one endless Christmas Eve where I didn’t sleep one wink as I lay next to a radiator, under the window, on the sun lounger that made up my bed in the guest bedroom my parents were also sleeping in. (I told you it was odd what else came to mind…). Some people try to tell me that insomniacs actually sleep a lot longer than they claim to, because they say that you spend a lot of the time in a half-dream state, but even now I can now recall every blooming second of that long and sleepless night from my childhood, and I can remember the almost agonising slowness of it ticking endlessly away.

Also in that picture is the petrol station/garage that was another gift that year. I thought that I had it for many, many years, because I remember the day I finally put it onto the bonfire. At our own house there was a patch of ground behind the garden swing where we used to regularly burn the rubbish on a Saturday morning. I got to quite like bonfires and would even be left to tend them at an age when it was probably hugely inappropriate for me to do so. One weekend, after the terrible “Summerland” fire had been all over the news, I decided that my garage should suffer the same fate, and up in flames it went.

I’ve just had a look and discovered that the Summerland fire on the Isle of Man was in 1973, but I was convinced that it was at least a couple of years later than that, because I would have been very young in 1973 to be so aware of the consequences of such a massive disaster. I suppose I must have started to become aware of the possibilities of disaster about that time, because holiday jets seemed to be constantly falling out of the skies in those days, and the Moorgate Tube disaster also sticks vividly in my memory. Serena Williams may well describe the past year as being a “disaster”, but I learned the true meaning of the word long ago.

My awareness of the aircraft disasters came, I think, because of the general air of nervousness surrounding my own first flight in late 1972. Cheap package deals to countries like Yugoslavia had finally become available if you saved really hard. I think they were so cheap because you got to fly on the pencil-thin Russian Tupolev 134A  aircraft that looked ever so flimsy sitting on the tarmac alongside the study looking 737s and never instilled the greatest of confidence as you approached it in the days when you had to walk across the actual ground to get to your plane.

One little photo, and suddenly we’ve been taken a journey through classic cars to Italy and Yugoslavia, a little bit of almost forgotten modern history, a touch of insomnia and some dabblings in architecture. All of this knowledge is, as yet, unknown to the tiny potato-faced one. I wonder if I could step into the picture and whisper in his ear to do something else with his life, whether he would take any notice?

I doubt it. He was a stubborn little sod.

BLINKY, THE WONDER CAR

“Blinky, the wonder car” has been in hospital. Blinky woke up one morning earlier this week feeling a little “throaty” and in the evening, when it became obvious that it wasn’t just the damp of the dawn, but something more troublesome, a quick jaunt to the garage seemed a sensible option to consider, despite the fact that little pound signs seem to light up in the mechanics’ eyes whenever I walk through the door these days, as if I’ve sorted their next holiday funding issues at a stroke.

Still, the chugging and grinding didn’t sound too healthy, and there was always the possibility that something catastrophic was an imminent prospect, so off I toddled and, as I pulled up, there was an immediate knowing look from one of the mechanics.

“You got an exhaust problem, then?”

So I guess that was what I – or rather Blinky – had. There was a moment of relief that it wasn’t likely to be something mechanically much worse, tempered by the obvious problem that this was still a job that needed to be done and the credit card was already whimpering and trying to shuffle around and hide itself in a dark corner of my wallet where I wouldn’t be able to find it.

I went into the office to talk to the owner of the garage in order to book Blinky’s appointment for transplant surgery and a well-groomed chap was already in there talking to him, just finishing off a little chat before departing. The mechanic, the owner and myself watched him go.

“That’s the accountant,” said the owner.

“I’ll bet his car runs well,” I replied.

This at least made them both laugh, which was nice. I do sometimes struggle to make small talk with mechanics, plumbers, electricians and the like. I think it’s because I think they think I must be some sort of idiot for not being able to do these things myself and then I seem to get intimidated by their competence at something so practical, which can however utterly bamboozle me. Maybe they were just humouring me, or maybe they just weren’t really paying attention as they were being distracted by those lovely, glowing pound signs.

Blinky and I have been together now for over seven years, which I think might just be the longest relationship I’ve ever had with any car. Blinky got the name because for some reason it seldom seems to have every single one of its bulbs working for any length of time, so I always seem to be replacing one or other of them. I suppose that “Winky” might be slightly more appropriate, but “Winky the wonder car” just sounds slightly wrong to me. “The wonder car” bit comes from “I wonder quite how it keeps going,” in case you hadn’t guessed.

It really was also the natural name to give it, following on from my previous two cars, which had been dubbed “Clunky” and “Clunky 2” by someone in the office where I used to work. These were the two red Volvos that I had during the time I worked there. I’ve never been in a position to own a new car, so they were the last in a long line of cheapish vehicles I’ve owned that possibly cost more to repair over the years than they ever were to buy.

The first car I ever had was an electric-blue Ford Escort of 1974 vintage that my dad bought for me after I passed my test and which went like a rocket, could be opened using a half-pence piece, and didn’t seem to have proper brakes on the right hand side which ultimately led in some small part to its untimely demise a scant seven months later. Slightly before that happened, my dad said one day that he really wouldn’t mind if I wanted to sell it and buy an MG or something, which I always put down to a tiny bit of wishful thinking on his part.

After that I had a rather excellent relationship with a trusty old dark blue MkIII Cortina for nearly five years that had to be let go when my post-educational unemployment meant I couldn’t afford to have it repaired. There’s one just like it that features regularly in “The Sweeney” which always raises a fond thought. My sister persuaded me into buying a ridiculously jacked-up beige Capri with a brown vinyl roof shortly after that, which got its door caved in by a hit-and-run pranger when it was parked outside a friend’s house the very same week I got it, and after buying new doors from the scrapyard, was returned to my sister for “repair” and I never saw it again.

When I finally got a job, I bought another Cortina, this time in a ridiculous shade of what I like to call “orange” but which a lot of people referred to as “salmon pink”. That served me well for a couple of years, but engine troubles had it taken away for repair and it too was never seen again.

Then came the “car share” years driving a Diamond White Fiesta that belonged to a certain someone who took the car away with her when she departed. That is a long and unpleasant story which I know has you just bubbling with anticipation to hear about, but which I’m not entirely sure I’m quite ready to share just yet.

Still, from that emotional crisis were born the Scirocco years. Four and a half years of pure joy and extortionate parts bills ended with rather brilliant timing by a Dutch lorry driver who caved in another door when he pulled across two lanes on an “A” road one evening when I was driving home from work about a week before I was due to move out of my flat. His steering wheel being on the “wrong” side meant he didn’t check his mirrors and didn’t see me in the lane alongside him. Tragically whilst the damage only seemed slight – some scrapes and a massive dent in the passenger door – the insurance folk deemed it to be a “write off”  - doors apparently costing more than the car was worth, they said - after they’d taken it away for repair and it too was never seen again.

Soon after that my sister persuaded me to buy one of her then current boyfriend’s used cars, so I acquired a huge, gas-guzzling, metallic-blue Rover 2600 fastback on which the driver’s door immediately broke and jammed permanently shut about a day after I got it and which catastrophically and permanently died three months after that. I was very happy to see that one taken away and never seen again, you can be sure of that.

I had part shares in a golden diesel Fiesta for a little while after that, a situation that came to an end in even more unfortunate circumstances. My car sharing experiences were always destined to involve Fiestas, it would seem. Then there were the two Clunkies and we’re back up to date with Blinky.

Eleven cars, across nearly thirty years, each of which had a tale to tell.

Of course there are those who would dislike Blinky on sight, just because it’s a four-wheel drive machine, albeit not a huge one. I live at the top of a semi-rural hill that can get wickedly icy in the middle of winter so, whilst I might feel the odd pang of guilt on the odd summer’s day, for quite a few days of an average winter it becomes a rather vital thing to have and I remain unrepentant at having it, and it is the only car we have. I sometimes worry when I have to leave it parked in the city because I’ve heard about people attacking 4x4s just for being what they are. I find myself wondering, “How on Earth do they know where I live?” when I leave it parked and go shopping, but I suppose the consequences of most forms of extremism are seldom completely thought through.

But despite everything, so far, Blinky prevails. Another bill for the quite bizarre amount of £197.19 sits in the receipts box and adds to the overdraft. I think I’d’ve rounded it up or knocked off the 19p, but then there is that accountant to think about. I guess it’s still cheaper than replacing Blinky though, and I like to think that keeping the old thing on the road is generally more environmentally friendly than just scrapping it, when you consider the carbon footprint of building Blinky in the first place and equally what it might be to build another Blinky, and anyway, it's Blinky. How could you scrap Blinky? We've been through such a lot, I'm not sure if I could.

So, here's to you, Blinky! This is a kind of post-operative "get well" message to you. I don’t know how much longer we’ll be together, but for now, Blinky, I'm happy enough in your company, and I hope you're happy in mine, and that’s just the way I'd like to keep it.