My cars: a short guide. Part V - My Triumph Toledo and another sad end

After the undignified end suffered by my Datsun and I had sold it to my dope dealer (which sounds a lot more louche than was the reality), I needed another car and agreed to buy my flatmate Wayne's Triumph Toledo. Wayne Francis was a reporter on the Evening Mail where I worked as a sub, and Wayne liked a pint or two, then three or four, then five or six. The night Wayne didn't arrive home three sheets to the wind was the day of the Second Coming.

Wayne was from Bristol and had a broad Bristol accent. In many ways he fitted the clichéd view of reporters (as I did when I was still working as one, except for the heavy drinking. One girlfriend I had was warned by a doctor in the hospital in which she worked that reporters were like sailors - they had a girl in every port. She was living in South Wales and I was living in Newcastle at the time, and when she told me what the doctor had told her, I pooh-poohed it and swore my undying love. Unfortunately, I WAS running two more girls at the time, one of whom even had the same name as she did, she made it difficult when one of them rang and I was told: "Patrick, Amanda on the phone for you."), but he was a good reporter and eventually became the Sun's royal correspondent.

I met him again years later when he got sick of following assorted royals around the world and joined the Mail instead. He told me that the Palace operated a system of apartheid among the various royal correspondents and distinguished them between 'one of us' like, for example, the Mail's Richard Kay, and 'not one of us' like, for example gobby, hard-drinking Wayne from Bristol. But it didn't bother him one jot.
I can't remember why he was selling his Toledo (his was dark blue, not brown like the one pictured), but I was interested in buying it. I no longer needed a car in order to bump my income be fiddling expenses, because as a sub-editor I didn't get expenses, but I still needed a car to get around. It, too, provided good service for several years, although, if I remember correctly, the radio went on the blink, and there was some special kind of fiddling around with it to get it to work.

The end came for the Toledo quite quickly and in an unexpected way. By then I was working for Power News, the CEGB staff newspaper, and was once again creaming the moolah in buckshee total bullshit mileage expenses even though I was still a sub. (If you remember, we used to organise long and completed pointless trips simply to claim mileage, the odd thing being that everyone from the editor up knew what was going on.)

First the chassis 'broke'. I use inverted commas because I am not to sure chassis can 'break' but this one did and the engine sank by what must have been a foot or two. Now, I would simply get rid of a car like that an accept the financial hit, but then, I was rather more stupid and got a garage to repair it. This they did. A week later, I was returning from the printers in Bicester and was just north of Stratford when a car suddenly drove onto the main road and I went straight into it.

My car was a write-off, and I was lucky to survive, especially as my seatbelt was broken and I was, to all intents and purposes, not wearing one. And that was the end of the Toledo, just a week after spending £400 (in 1983, now, in 2013, anything between £1,1018 and £1,963 according to a very useful website called What's It Worth which you can find here for working out today's prices in pounds and here for doing the same in dollars) on having the bloody thing repaired. Next came my massive Vauxhall Victor, which was built and, unfortunately, also drove like a tank.

Modern dilemmas: an occasional series.

I have called this Modern Dilemmas, but actually the dilemma is age-old - only the names have been changed to protect the guilty. In fact, nothing has been changed and I shall begin with names. My daughter Elsie turned 13 in August, but didn't have a party at the time. Instead, tonight she and three of her friends were taken to the local pub for a meal. Her friends were Ruth, Amazon and Amber, and immediately the reader will realise that this is being written in the 21st century. Once only the heroines in schlock novelettes and lowbrow TV drama had names like Amber and Amazon. But in the year of Our Lord 2009, young 13-year-old girls from Cornish secondary schools are now so called. I had heard about Amber and Amazon but I had never met them before. I knew Ruth well. All three are very pleasant girls and none really has a Cornish accent. Instead, all of them, young Elsie included, speak in that way, like, in which Ts are dropped regularly but which is otherwise pretty classless. Even Princess Di herself had an odd accent which would not have been out of place in a typing pool. And Tony Blair was the worst offender for leaving out his Ts, especially as he did it to suck up to the great unwashed.
The dilemma was that all three of my daughter's guest, although Ruth to a slightly lesser extent, have appalling table manners. Elsie, I'm glad to say, more or less passes muster, except that her manners have slightly gone to seed since she has been attending Wadebridge Secondary School. But when she is at home, I pull her up smartish, even at the risk of being unpopular. I can honestly say it's the only thing I am quite strict on. But what do I do about the table manners of the other three when I am sitting at table with them? My inclination is gently to admonish them in the kindest, but firmest way possible. But that can so often go awry, leaving the child involved rather bruised. And, I here you ask, is it any of my business anyway? Well, I think it is. However, tonight I took the diplomatic option and said nothing. I merely bit my lip, grinned and bore it all stoically, not least because I didn't want to show up my daughter in front of her friends. Young ones are very sensitive about these matters. (As it was I was ticked off once or twice for laughing 'loudly' and only got off the hook a little when Amazon announced her father also laughed loudly and was always being told off for doing so.)
Even when Amber attacked her ham using her fork like a dagger - stab, stab, stab - I was, to my own horror - a model of discretion. I pride myself that I didn't even allow myself to look pained or sigh quietly. An onlooker would have assumed I was quite happy to see these children eating like slobs (I do exaggerate a little, but you get the picture.)
I have faced this dilemma before, when my nieces and nephews across the lane in the farm have come for supper or when I have been invited for supper there. At the risk of sounding prissy, it turns my stomach to be sitting at table with someone who, as they unfortunately do, eat with their mouths open and who don't put all the food in their mouth at once, but leave some hanging out. When I have been over there, I have kept quiet. When they have been eating at my table I have, as gently as possible said something (to my wife's irritation as she is the kind who hate confrontation of any kind). But what is one supposed to do?

An afternoon with Julie Christie and Dirk Bogarde. Could have done without Dirk Baby. Ham? Yes, and then some

The Daily Mail is giving away a set of 'Hollywood Classic' films, i.e. tat which otherwise no one in their right mind would consider trying to sell. So on Wednesday, I wandered through to Promotions and grabbed myself several. At the moment I am lying in bed with 'flu-like symptoms' (it's not a cold, as I don't have a headache - I suspect it has something to do with those bloody statins) so I decided to watch one of them. I chose Darling because everyone talks about it, but having seen it, I wonder why. Christ, has it dated. And the script is by Frederic Raphael - he even won an Oscar for it - so every second line is a clever quotable quote. It also stars Dirk Bogarde who, in my opinion can't act his way out of a paper bag, always comes across as gay and should have stuck to light comedy. If you want to see some hilariously bad acting in a hilariously terrible film, watch Bogarde in Visconti's The Damned. He and it are truly awful. Who says homosexuals always have better taste. Darling is also pretty dire. At the time, it was daring and modern, but now it just comes over as facile and dated. Those of your interested in a little more pfgpowell bile might care to visit my IMDB review

Blogging: when will it end?

This blogging is getting to be a habit and it seems that so far I have written 419 entries this week alone. When will it end? What will end it? Death? Bankruptcy? Can people (either of them) really find any satisfaction at all in reading the inconsequential dribblings of a washed-up hack whose only gift is knowing more than the average joe about where to put the commas? I hope so.

NB A while ago, I started an entry about 'how the Left works' and got so carried away that I never got around to finishing that particular strand. So if you are getting bored with my interminable account of how over the years cars have got the better of me, stick with it: and exposé of the fiendish Left is still to come.

My cars: a short guide. Part IV — my Datsun Cherry and its sad end

Before I start, I should note that I am quite aware that an account of all the cars I have owned might not make the most interesting reading. However, I have private (and very simple) reasons for doing so.
The 1300 did great work, carrying me up and down the country to visit my then girlfriend - I was living in Newcastle and drove down every 3/4 weeks to see her in South Wales - and then saw me through to my move to Birmingham when I joined the Evening Mail as a sub. But within a few months, a turned into a side street just off Colmore Circus where the Mail offices were (they're now in some godforsaken industrial estate in Castle Bromwich near Spaghetti Junction), lost my concentration as I cheerily waved to a friend and crashed into a car coming the other way. The car wasn't a write-off, but it would have cost an arm and a leg to have it repaired and I couldn't be arsed. The only silver lining was that about an hour after the crash, I was approached by one of the compositors who I had never seen before who informed me that he had witnessed the crash from an upstairs window and that the other guy had been driving in the middle of the road. So we were both to blame, and as far as insurance was concerned, I wasn't out of pocket. I got rid of the 1300 and bought my nest car. The one irritating aspect to the 1300, which was otherwise quite a nice car, was that BL, or whatever they were calling themselves that week, had used a fancy hydro-suspension technique in its design, which provided a great ride when it was in good nick, but which you could never again get quite right once it was out of kilter. And by the time I came to get rid of the 1300, it was well out of kilter. Steering was becoming a challenge especially at high speeds on the motorway.
Datsun Cherry (which looked very much like the one in the picture on the right) was for sale at a secondhand car dealership at the bottom of Milner Road, the street where I lived in Selly Park, Birmingham. It cost was in a very nice condition and cost me a round £1,000. It had no blemishes of any kind and ran very nicely indeed. I was particularly pleased with the spring-loaded gear shift. However, a week or so after buying it, the alternator failed. I was in Leicester at the time, visiting me girlfriend (another one, not the one mentioned above) and, to be fair, there is no way the dealer could have known it was on its way out. However, once I had bought another (courtesy of the RAC chap who came out to help me - they and their AA counterparts have a sideline in supplying parts to stranded motorists who pay a little over the odds, but are grateful for getting the part there and then) and was back home in Birmingham, I walked to the bottom of the road and asked the dealer - there was two of them, in fact - what they were going to do about it. Nothing, they told me, and pointed out, as I just have, that there was no way they could have known the alternator was about to go tits up. Dear reader, I then did something I have never done before and which taught me a valuable lesson: I simply sat it out, was perfectly reasonable and insisted that I should get part of the money back. I was patient, kept it friendly, but I didn't let up. And, finally, I bored them into submission. I can't remember how much they gave me to offset the cost of a new alternator, but I remember being happy with the sum.
The Cherry gave sterling service, was a nippy little car and I liked it. Then things went a wrong. I noticed a little rust on one of the front wings, a tiny amount really, hardly noticeable, but still being young and stupid enough to fancy a little car DIY, I went around to a friend's house and borrowed his Black & Decker. The idea was that I would gently sand of the top coat, get to the rusted area, sand away the rust, apply a primer, then apply paint. The trouble was that the deeper I sanded (actually I was using the rotary wire attachment), the further I delved into filler: it turned out that most of the wing consisted of filler. It seems the dealers were buying up care which were closer to wrecks than anything else, having the body tarted up and selling them. It made - and makes - no sense to me unless they bought them for a song and the bodywork undertaken cost them almost nothing, or else they would not make a profit. And another puzzle was that mechanically the Cherry was very sound and I do not remember having any trouble at all. Anyway, needless to say (although, as always when people use that stupid phrase, I shall say it anyway, whether or not it needs to be said), after my botched attempt at DIY - I didn't fill in the rather large hole I had made - the car looked rather more ragged than I should have liked. Added to that, while on a trip to Essex to try to get off with a girl I fancied (I didn't), someone skidded in the snow and smashed into the Cherry while it was parked outside her house. So it looked even more ragged. That's when I decided to get rid of it. I sold it to the West Indian chap I used to buy my blow from at the Kings Head in Balsall Heath. I was surprised he wanted it, but he seemed happy enough. My next car was a Triumph Toledo, which I bought from my flatemate, Wayne Francis.