My cars: a short guide. Part II — a rustbucket Hillman Superminx and a slighly snazzier V4 Ford Corsair

I had the Triumph for a month before it rolled down the hill and out of my life. As I said, my insurance agent just happened to be passing, and he told me of a Hillman Superminx for sale at a garage in Newport. I think I went and bought it the same day, although that seems unlikely.
It, too, was in no great state as a car, but its defects were not immediately apparent. It was something of a tank of a car, ponderous and heavy to steer, but I can't remember any particular disasters or faults. However, I knew the time was approaching when I should get rid of it when my girlfriend and I drove to North Lincolnshire to visit her parents and her sister and brother-in-law who were also staying. Her brother-in-law was an Irishman and a mechanic with the RAF. He kindly said he would take a look at the car to see whether there was anything amiss. It was apparent that there was, that the whole chassis was more or less rust, when he tried to jack up the car. In stead of lifting the car bit by bit as it was designed to, the head of the jack simply disappeared into the chassis. I did get rid of the car, although I can't remember where or how.
My next car cost me, if I remember £295. It was a Ford Corsair with a 1700cc V4 engine and, although he was still almost a banger, was a huge step up from the junk I had so far been driving. It went like the clappers. The only cosmetic fault it had has a hole the size of a small apple at the bottom of the driver's
door. I did have one or two problems with it, however. One problem was simple though bizarre and took a while to diagnose. I was driving from South Wales to Staffordshire to see my girlfriend when the engine kept cutting out. It got to the point where I could only crawl along in fits and starts in second gear. I pulled into a petrol station, but it was after 5pm and the mechanics had shut up shop for the week. The women behind the counter, however, took pity on me and told me her husband was a keen amateur mechanic and he would take a look to see whether he couldn't sort out what was wrong. It took him several hours, but he succeeded. The problem was that the coil had somehow worked itself loose and kept banging against the engine block. This caused the engine to cut out. But when it cut out, the car stopped and the jerky movement banged the loose coil away from the engine block again, so the engine began firing again. This is what I had put up with for several miles before I stopped at the petrol station. He guy simply tightened up the coil again and the problem was solved. The only other problem I had was when the clutch cable went and I had to have a new clutch installed.
I had drove the Corsair (which is pictured above. Mine was the same colour, except that it had — a rather naff — black vinyl roof) for about 18 months before I got rid of it. By then it was getting rather ratty. The brakes were completely shot and so was the steering. I sold it for £80 to some guy up the road and felt guilty about that because it really was a death trap. My next car was another step up, an Austin 1300, more of which another time.

Don't count your chickens - you never know, one might get away

Well, it all went well for a day, then this morning, while adding 'labels' to my previous entry on how my laptop is behaving again and underling the imperative of smug gits such as myself thanking God for his small mercies, it bloody happened again. Sod's Law — freezing bloody cursor. This really is irritating because my plan was to sell it while the going was good, but — all pretensions to being a complete unethical cunt notwithstanding — I wasn't going to do so until a week or so had passed without the cursor freezing. Oh, bloody well. See how this thing pans out. Onto other matters: dawn broke, and I kept a sharp eye on the clock. Seven o'clock followed six o'clock after exactly 60 minutes, so all is otherwise still well in the world. Further clues that today is shaping up not to include any more unpleasant shocks: the fridge is still quite cold, I turned on the cold water tap at the bathoom sink and water came out, and Justin Webb on Radio 4's Today still sounds like a rather smug git (so that would be two of us).

In praise of life's small mercies.

It is quite odd how small, insignificant details can please us. A day or two ago, I wrote about my growing collection of laptops and why I bought the third: the first was slowly misbehaving and I decided I would try to sell it before the malfunction, whatever it was, set in properly. Unfortunately, that seemed to happen far faster than I had anticipated, so that for the past few days, the cursor on this laptop — I am writing on it now — would freeze and the only way I could get to use the laptop again was to reboot it. Things looked even bleaker when I rang an Apple dealer in Kensington who told me that the fault probably related to the logic board, that I would most probably need a new logic board, that I was looking at spending around £200 and that as far as he was concerned it wasn't worth it. He did, however add — and this will put his downbeat analysis rather in perspective — that the dealer he worked for would give me £100 of the price of a new Macbook is I part-exchanged the iBook. What made it all the more galling was yesterday the laptop even stopped recognising that it had a built-in airport card, one which was supposedly brand-new when it was fitted just over a month ago.
Then, researching (a posh word for 'looking up') possible remedies on the internet, I came across a process called 'repairing permissions'. This is quite easy to do, and I did it. And it seems to have cured whatever is was amiss. Such little things can cheer you up.

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.