My cars: a short guide. Part I — A Triumph Herald, the wreck which was my first car

My first car was a Triumph Herald. It was a complete wreck and a death-trap, although at the time I was as pleased as punch with it. I was 25 when I bought it and knew little of life or the wily ways of South Wales wideboys, and I knew even less about cars. I was working in South Wales as a reporter for a local weekly, and quite apart from wanting a car of my own because travelling up and down the Valleys was more convenient by car than by bus, I also wanted to boost my rather meagre wages with the oddly extremely generous mileage we were paid. (At one point, a little later in my career in South Wales and working for the South Wales Argus, the weekly's sister paper, I actually doubled my weekly wage by claiming bullshit mileage expenses. The odd thing was that the news editor who signed off those expenses every week must have been aware that Abertillery to Brynmawr and back was only about six miles, not the 20-odd miles I was claiming for, and surely he must have been puzzled that when I went on my rounds of police calls in Brymawr, Ebbw Vale and Tredegar, I didn't simply make a a round trip, but claimed that after each visit to a police station, I returned to Abertillery to start a new journey to a new location. But this is exactly what I claimed I was doing, and it was a simple ruse which usefully bumped up my expenses each week almost tenfold. Getting on top of how to claim expenses is the first vital lesson a reporter must learn. If you can't do that properly, you'll never do anything much properly).
The Herald I had set my heary on was for sale on a car lot a hundred feet or so off the
main road in Blaina, a real shithole between Abertillery and Brynmawr. What to my eyes looked like a rather down-at-heel car lot a was, in fact, more or less a junk yard. But I was a naive sort of chap in those days, very trusting. The Herald was like the one above, although mine was an indeterminate mid to dark grey and a lot, lot rustier. It was for sale for £95 (in today's money £597 according to http://www.measuringworth.com, though that does seem to me to be extraordinarily high), but I had only managed to save £65. I had been regularly looking in the classifieds for cars for sale and the prices being asked were always way beyond what I could afford. The Herald was the cheapest car I had yet come across by a long chalk and I had set my heart on it. However, even at the cheap price being asked, I was still £30 short.
'I've only got £65,' I told the 'salesman' plaintively, fearing that he would tell me to get on my bike.
'That'll do,' he said magnanimously, and I should, of course, there and then have smelled a rat. But I was so chuffed to have my first car. The salesman filled me in on its finer points and explained that I had to have a wire leading form one part of the engine to another to complete the circuit, but that this wire should be removed when the engine was not running or else the battery would be drained. So for the next few days, I conscientiously removed the wire whenever I parked it, and put it back in place when I wanted to drive some.
A weekend or so later, and proud as punch, I drove it my car from South Wales home to Henley-on-Thames to show my younger brother. It was a difficult journey because I got lost at Usk. Also the spring which was linked to the accelerator pedal to return it to the neutral position when it was not depressed had been lost and replaced with a heavy duty one from a lorry. Ten minutes after setting off my right foot ached like hell.
The following morning, I got up very early to drive back to South Wales and discovered I had forgotten to remove the wire, so the battery was flat. Mark, my brother, got up and gave me a push to the nearest hill, and I managed to bump start it. But I was still heavily in love with my 'car', so I didn't care. A week or two later, I parked it somewhere or other, crucially on a hill, and when I returned five minutes later, it had gone.
'Christ, it's been stolen!' I thought, but in my heart of hearts I knew that no one in their right mind would steal this heap of shit, and of course I was right. It hadn't been stolen, it had simply rolled away down the hill, turning right as it did so, and into the back of someone else's car. You see, every time I had applied the handbrake, nothing had actually happened, because it didn't have a handbrake. In fact, had I turned around when I had parked it a few minutes earlier, I would even have seen it rolling away.
The car was a write-off, but as so often happens in the South Wales valleys, as I was being interviewed by police over the absence of a handbrake, my insurance agent walked by, saw what had happened, and advised me that a garage he had visited earlier that day in Newport had for sale a Hillman Superminx which might suit me. So once all the boring business with the police was out of the way (which, naturally, led to a fine and three penalty points on my licence, the first of many), my girlfriend drove me to Newport and I bought the Superminx, for, I think, £200. It, too, was heap of shit, but not quite as bad as the Herald. However, the important thing was that I had a set of wheels again and could carry on creaming it on mileage expenses. The Superminx was identical to the one shown above, except that it was also a lot rustier. More about it in another post. And still to come: my Ford Corsair V8, my Austin 1300, my Datsun Cherry and my Triumph Toledo. Can you wait?

I'll come clean: I don't have a sense of humour, or so spoof sci-fi 'buffs' would have you believe.

I'm obviously in something of a chatty mood tonight, so after a little drama — Lifeline SouthWest rang to say my stepmother had fallen over, was not hurt, had to get up again, so could I go round, which I did — I've decided to inform those non-Brits among the two of you of a spectacularly unfunny sci-fi radio series and its spectacularly unfunny follow-up series. You might, of course, hear about it from others for whom 1) the original series was spectacularly funny, and 2) the follow-up is an equally smash-hit ribtickler. I am, of course, talking about The Hitchiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Its fans regard those such as me as philistine who have had a sense of humour bypass. We regard them as nerdy, geeky fuckwits who in the pecking order of those to be kicked regularly come just before trainspotters and C&W 'buffs' from the West Midlands. Actually, make that all buffs. If any group of people deserves perpetual scorn and a dose of swine flu, it is 'buffs' whether their thing is films, the blues, C&W, photography, cars or stamps. Incidentally, it's strange how you cannot be a 'buff' of some things: no one could be a fishing 'buff', for example.
Back to THGTTG, I must admit that it leaves me absolutely and utterly cold. Where's the joke. I posted a message along those lines on the Radio 4 website and was told that I lacked a sense of humour. Perhaps I do, but if thinking the crock of shit is funny gains you you Humour Badge, then count me out.
Actually, it occurs to me that slagging of buffs of every stripe might be worth an entry in itself. Oh, what the hell, life's too short.

A third laptop (which is something of a luxury), a second set of the same faults on my first laptop, and a missed opportunity to be unethical

Having sailed through rather choppy waters these past few days, this blog is pleased to announce that the following topic is neither controversial, indiscreet or even interesting. (And would someone please tell me an easy way to distinguish between the distinct meanings of 'discrete' and 'discreet'? I only know, unhelpful as the knowledge is, that one doesn't mean the other, and whether or not I have used the word I want to use in the correct manner, whether I have used the incorrect work correctly, or vice versa (if you see what I mean, and if you do, tell me because I don't) — pause for breath — I really do not have a clue). (Furthermore, I have just used a set of parentheses within another set of parentheses, and I am certain that such usage is completely unacceptable, and if not unacceptable, at the very least unconventional. Wasn't it Eugene T. Mahlzeit who said . . . (cont. P 94 and back to more mundane matters).) (Note the correct positioning of the full stop between the two sets of end parentheses.)
(Phew.)
My laptop, or rather one of the three laptops I now own is playing up. It is the 12in iBook G4 which goes with me on my travels. I also have a 15in Powerbook and last week bought a 14in iBook G4 with a view to selling this one. You see the cursor keeps freezing and the problem has been getting worse. So I reasoned that if I sold this one before the problem has fully set in, I could shrug it off as a 'new' problem if and when it reoccurred when the new owner had taken possession. Not very ethical, I know, but then I have never pretended to be ethical. However, now I won't even get the chance to be unethical becsause the fault is so regular that I could never pretend it had only 'just' started once the laptop had left my hand.
One of the two faults is that the airport card goes missing. Oddly since it has been going missing, the problem with the freezing has not yet happened. You and I might think the two were related, but MacMan Lee, the Mac repairer who took £80 off me just over four weeks ago for apparently correcting a very similar fault by installing a new - he says - airport card says they cannot be connected. Well, he would, wouldn't he.
I bought the second laptop last week and picked it up on Tuesday. I shall have to do a fair amount of creative thinking in order to slowly introduce it into this household as having a bigger screen and generally looking bigger, I can't pretend it is this one. My dilemma is that every time a bill arrives - and over these few weeks what with buying another car rather than MoT the old one, the electricity bill, the MoT bill for my wife's car and the car tax - I engage in a fair amount of moaning and complaining. Buying a - third - laptop for £253 lays me wide open. 'Well, if you can afford another laptop you don't need, you can certainly afford to pay the bills' is an accusation which it would be hard to defend oneself against. Do you see my point? I do so hope you do, because I shan't be getting much sympathy from this side of the fence.

A kindly word of warning to all bloggers

It is perhaps pertinent to point out that what a blogger records on his or her blog is, courtesy of the net — once known as the world wide web — accessible to — well, the whole world. So a degree of discretion is advisory and necessary. My apologies to anyone I might have upset.

How the Left works: a discursive and rather long analysis of Marxist/Leninist strategy with a personal example (or something like that)

What is now more than 20 years ago, and it shocks me a little to say so as in some ways it seems far more recent, I lived and worked in Cardiff. I was working as a sub-editor on the South Wales Echo, which I had joined in February 1986. I was 36 years old. It was my first journalistic job since leaving the CEGB's staff newspaper, Power News, in September 1984, and my first job back on a real newspaper since leaving the Birmingham Evening Mail for Power News in November 2002.
I say that the Evening Mail was a 'real' newspaper because Power News was much more of a company mouthpiece in which everything was hunky-dory, the future was always bright and, I shouldn't wonder, the staff all went to work with boundless joy in their hearts, able as they were to devote another day to the glorious CEGB (Central Electricity Generating Board). As the electricity generating industry was so vital to the country and because any government of whatever hue wanted to avoid trouble at all costs, CEGB staff were treated with kid gloves and were exceptionally well-paid to keep the unions happy. So, for example, my wage jumped overnight from the £8,500 the Evening Mail was paying me to £11,300. In addition we got marvellous travel expenses, so all four of us subs, each of whom was responsible for two regional editions, organised trips away from the office for whatever reason, just to clock up the mileage. In addition, Power News was published monthly, so twice a month all four of us, plus the chief sub, travelled from our homes in various parts of the West Midlands to the printers in Bicester to proof-read. Naturally we could easily have organised sharing a car, but we all drove there separately to get the mileage, claim the exceptionally generous mileage allowance and boost our bank balances.
The pertinent point was that everyone higher up the ladder knew that such unnecessary trips were being made, but did not at all object, for three reasons. It kept the workforce sweet, they were doing the same themselves, and, anyway, as the CEGB (often wittily referred to by me as the KEGB, a regular quip which went down like a lead balloon) was a public body, it was public money that was being spent so what did they care.
This is a long way from Cardiff, but bear with me, if necessary to How The Left Works parts II and III.
Working on Power News was deadly, deadly dull, despite the comparatively large amounts of moolah I was earning. And despite the large amounts of moolah I was earning, I still got into debt.
At the beginning of the 1980s, I had become interested in photography. I ditched the silly 35mm holiday snap camera I was using with which I couldn't get the pictures I thought I was taking, and bought myself an SLR, first a Pentax something or other, then a Pentax K1000, which was not half as sophisticated, but which was the one I ended up using almost all the time. The next step was to teach myself developing and printing, and to print I borrowed all the necessary kit from a colleague of my then girlfriend (the one woman so far in my life I should have married, though at the time I was pretty immature, so I shan't claim it would necessarily have worked.)
By this time I was working for the CEGB and was being paid loads, so I started buying photographic equipment as though there were no tomorrow, my own enlarger - a very good one - lenses, flashes, slave units, trays, all sorts. And, of course, I got into debt, although at the time that didn't much bother me.
On holiday down here in Cornwall visiting my father at Easter 1984, I was out taking pictures along the north coast and fell into conversation with some guy. I can't remember anything about him except that he suggested that if I wanted to do photography properly, I should consider going to college and studying photography.
So I got myself a place on a very good course in the Wednesbury college of West Bromwich College, left my job and on the strength of £1,500 which, by chance, my father had given all his children, and the promise of four shifts a week working as a casual sub on the Birmingham Post, I left Power News, to my delight as well as that of the editor and chief sub, and began the life of a student. It worked well for a term.
Except for Wednesdays when we had a long session in the studio which didn't end until around 7pm, I would jump into my 2cv at just after 5pm, drive down the M5 from Wednesbury to Colmore Circus, Birmingham, and work a four-hour shift. Then it was back to my house in the Maypole (the area was so-named after a pub of the same name, which was one of those massive Brummie drinking halls and which has since been demolished) and often some kind of college work (always with a spliff in my hand) until 2am when I went to bed. I enjoyed that term a lot. Then it all fell apart.
Just after Christmas, the Post went for 100 redundancies and all casuals were axed. That was the end of that source of income. By Easter 1985, at the end of my second term, I realised did not have any money to pay my fees and support myself, so I had to leave the course and sign on unemployed.
Being jobless is no fun at all. I can't claim that what I felt was and is what others feel, but my sense of self-worth took a nosedive and I lived from 8am until the following 8am when the postman arrived with possible replies to the job applications I had made.
I was unemployed for the following ten months, first applying for jobs as a newspaper photographer which was, in retrospect, utterly unrealistic - who was going to take on a 35-year-old with no relevant experience and whose portfolio of photographs had almost no human subjects? I was offered one job, on a small weekly in Loughborough at something like £5,000 a year, but I just couldn't afford to go. Then I widen my job search to include reporters jobs, but again had no luck. The one possibility was on a news agency in Buckinghamshire run by an ex-Sun hack. It was a very successful agency, but it became apparent that his interest in me was more personal than professional (even though he was married) and it also became apparent that I didn't want to cross to the pink side, so that came to nothing either.
Finally, I also began applying for jobs as a sub-editor, and here my luck change, mainly because then, and possibly now, subs are always in short supply. The trouble was that at the time I found sub-editing deadly dull and really didn't want to work as a sub any more. But because of interest payments my debts were growing and so, very reluctantly, I accepted the job on the South Wales Echo in Cardiff.
Well, we've arrived in Cardiff, but no sniff of the Left yet. Wait till part II. Or not.

Sounds like a problem to me

Some words for you: please read them and reflect. Their meanings have nothing to do with the point I shall make:

row, object, tear, produce, refuse, wound, lead, bass, invalid, present, close, subject, intimate.

What do they all have in common? Hint: is it any wonder 'foreigners' have more trouble learning British English than they should. It won't be for a want of trying.

Cars, men's men, boys' talk, more cars and the desirability of not gettting into debt

Posting on this blog virtually every five minutes while I was on holiday has rather given me a taste for it, so in the spirit of the great British pastime to Establish A Tradition (And Any Tradition Will Do, The More Pointless The Better), I shall tell you all - both - about my new car. That should be 'new' car, because it is, in fact, more than nine years old and has had two previous owners. The major feature in its favour is that it is not the pile of shit I have been driving these past two years and which was due for its MoT on October 3. To be fair, it wasn't a pile of shit when I bought it (from the garage which services my cars and from whom I bought this new ('new') one and the one before the one before the car I got rid of yesterday.
This one is also a Rover, V registration and has only don 77,000 odd miles, so it should be good. The body is also in quite good nick, but for me its unique selling point was that Rob Gibbons, the Cornish garage owner with whom I swap both jokes and cars, only wanted £800 for it. The previous on, an R registration Rover, which had already done 131,000 when I bought it and was not much of a looker. It looked a tad shabby and, for example, Princess Di or any of her circle would never have been seen dead in it. But it was safe, warm and took me to London and back at least 60 over these past two years. However, the power steering had been making also sorts of noises first thing in the morning and especially in the colder months, two tyres were barely legal and the exhaust was shot to pieces. All in all I calculated that it would take at least £600 to correct everything, buy the tyres and get it through the MoT, so the £800 I paid for this one, which comes with six months tax and a full 12-month MoT seems worth it. It's like getting a better car for £200. (Or is that Irish logic?) I had only bought the one this one replaced as an emergency vehicle because the one before another Rover, though N registration (keep up at the back, you are wasting no one's time but your own) was damaged beyond any reasonable hope after I had several too many sherries while visiting my stepmother on a cold December day in 2007 crashed into a county council white van while tearing around our narrow Cornish lanes far to fast.
I should also point out that as far as cars are concerned, I am not a 'man's man'. In fact, as far as I can tell I am not a man's man in any other respect except when talking football, rugby and snooker and 'totty' (lovely word that, which will mean bugger all to our American friend). Cars, leave me cold except when it comes to attempting small repairs. All that twin-carb, supercharged talk leaves me cold. I went to West End Motors in Bodmin to see what might be available to me under the £2,000 scrappage scheme and it seems I could have been able to drive away in a brand new Nissan Micra for £4,999 all in. But why get into debt? I tried to persuade myself finally to join the human race and buy a brand new car for a change, but I failed.
Amen, or as we men's men say 'she's got a lovely pair of headlamps'. Boom, boom.

Experts: are some of them born losers?

On another topic entirely. I have been a keen backgammon player ever since I learnt to play more than 20 years ago, and when I bought a secondhand PC for my children to use (I have always used Macs, but because of schoolwork, they often need a PC for exchanging files etc.) , I was very pleased to discover that included in the XP operating system was a facility for playing other people around the world at backgammon. So ever since we have owned the PC and whenever I am at home, I have very regulaly played several games of backgammon.
The system invites you to gauge your playing ability. You can choose from beginner, intermediate and expert. I have chosen intermediate, which I think is about right. The system also tries to match you up with other players of the same skill level, but occasionally you are matched with a beginner or an expert.
Playing a beginner is usually quite boring and it is usually very obvious from the moves the other player makes that he or she is a beginner. What is amusing is when you play an 'expert', and remember the grading is always done by the player him or herself. The strange thing about the 'experts' is that all to often, and certainly more often than might be down to chance, they are extremely bad losers. If it is obvious that they are not going to win the match, they simply quit. That tells me an awful lot about a certain aspect of human nature.

A rather more personal entry than usual

A joke-free, far more personal entry this morning, and I should add that I am rather glad that this blog is occasionally read by at least two people. One of them knows that my marriage was not made in Heaven, and each morning that sad fact is underlined yet again by my wife. To put it bluntly, she hardly ever speaks to me and hasn't done so for quite a few years. In a strange way I am a kind of non-person, a semi-detached member of this family and in odd, subtle ways - which might just be me being paranoid - she even seems to exclude me. It doesn't help that, more or less by necessity, I work in London and am away for four days a week, but it would be simple thing for my wife to include me in things . However, she chooses not to. Last night was an example: my young son will be leaving primary school next July and starting secondary school in September, so yesterday was an open evening at the school we hope he will be able to attend. This has been arranged for several weeks, yet the first I knew about it was when my wife and my children disappeared out of the door. There is absolutely none of that chit-chat which I am accustomed to elsewhere, she is silent, grim presence who only speaks to tell me not to do this or not to do that or to inquire whether this or that bill has been paid yet.
I grin and bear it and try to keep things normal, but - and here's the very personal bit - each morning when I yet again I am virtually invisible to her and am ignored as a non-person, my heart breaks quietly. I don't want to sound pathetic, but that is a good way of describing it. And I don't know what to do about it.
I have spoken to my sister-in-law several times and after my heart attack I was finally in touch with a counsellor. But there is only so much talking you can do, and if my wife doesn't show any willingness to want to change things, there isn't a lot I can do.
I won't pretend that I love her any more, and the circumstances of how we eventually ended up getting married are not the most romantic possible, but I do know that two civilised adults who two children together should be able to rub along together for the greater good. The trouble is that in several quiet ways my wife is odd. Often she doesn't respond like a 48-year-old woman, but like a 7-year-old on a primary school playground. Several years ago, when there was a very stupid feud in her family and it was split down the middle, she took sides (her two sisters didn't) and just cut her father out of her life. He more or less became a non-person. She has done something similar with my stepmother, who has now returned from her nursing home and lives barely four minutes walk away. She has not visited her in more than two years, but no one knows why. It is very odd behaviour. In the early days when it was apparent that we were quite different people and weren't getting one very well, I would try to persuade her to talk things through. But as I think I have recorded here before (possibly in this blog's first incarnation) her family are emotionally illiterate, and my wife seems to be the worst sufferer. She finds it impossible to talk about herself or her feelings, not just with me but as far as I know with anyone else.
There is much, much more I could write, but there is, in fact, little point. I as moved to make this entry after yet again coming downstairs in the morning to find her one communication with me being a short shopping list. But it is good to have the chance to let of a little steam and I also know that both the readers I know of have experienced the downside of marriage, so I am grateful that they indulge me and that I know this entry will, sooner or later, be read by someone else.

The Nobel Peace Prize, and my reaction were I informed I had won it

This has nothing to do with me personally, but I thought I might record how baffled I am that Barack Obama has been awarded the Nobel Peace Prize. What on earth for, for God's sake? I know I'm not along in being puzzled and tonight I heard on the radio that when first informed of the award by phone, the White House thought it was a hoax.
The whole Nobel Prize thing is anyway rather strange and utterly arbitrary. Several years ago, Yasser Arafat, Shimon Peres and Yitzhak Rabin shared the Peace Prize, and look what good that has done anyone. The whole thing is a joke.
If I were awarded the Peace Prize, or, for that matter, any of the Nobel Prizes, I would haughtily inform the Swedes that they could take one guess as to what to do with the award. This is one Englishman (with German blood - never forget that) who cannot be bought. No sir! Damned foreigners!