Tag-Archive for » cars «
After my recent spat on the M8 I had to get a new car. All that thinking and talking about cars got me thinking about how many cars I’ve had since I started driving and some of the stories that went with them all.
Can you remember all the cars you ever owned?
warning: nostalgia and petrol-head terms in the following post…
The first car I had was a Mk1 Ford Escort. It was silver with a purple roof when I got it (nice eh?) but I painted it black, with a brush. As the time, I reckoned it looked great, there were no brush strokes, it looked like a professional job… for a while, until the oil based paint got scuffed and started peeling off in strips.
The car itself was held together with cataloy and gun-gum but it was a learning experience and allowed me to hone my skills on rust removal, filling and sanding, oh yes the sanding.
Eventually I peeled all the paint off and resprayed it, with proper primer and black paint this time – it was sauce. Eventually sold it, when it failed its MOT, for £20. Well, we are talking the early eighties here, twenty quid was over 40 pints in the union bar.
It’s easy to have a swipe at the banking industry these days, in fact everyone does, relentlessly. In all reality, there’s not much us poor Joe-punters can do about it other than sit back and be affected in whatever proportionally smaller way the the billions or trillions that are talked about.
However, my gripe’s not with the spiffy hedge-fund boys, with their wonderfully complex financial models to efficiently lose shedloads of cash, nor is it the folks that reckoned sub-prime lending would be a wheeze or even those responsible for doling out massive payouts to executives of failing companies. While these are all undoubtedly ‘bad things’ that affect us all, they’re not affecting me directly, personally, right now.
Following a bit of an altercation on the M8 motorway last week, I had the joy of being issued with a courtesy car by my insurers.
I fully expected that I wouldn’t be getting temporary wheels of the standard I had been used to, but what transpired is just a bit beyond a joke. Well, clearly it is not beyond a joke since everyone is openly enjoying the fact I am having to drive the automotive equivalent of a roller-skate.