Notes From the Hard Shoulder (7 page)

In the past, I have lamented the efforts of boring motor-related businesses to promote themselves with the findings of a fatuous survey or two.

Then I noticed that they'd changed tactics, and had started dispensing banal advice about winter driving or foreign motoring holidays in an attempt to make their industry seem more newsworthy than it really is.

But the latest efforts by Purple
Parking to avoid paying for a proper advert actually defy belief. The company that is now branded
purpleparking, its last remaining space having been sold off for £9.95 per 24-hour period or part thereof, is claiming that its London Heathrow car park is haunted. Spooky, really, because the last time I used the 50-acre site – where 'strange noises and sharp changes in temperature have been reported', and where during the day a car is parked every 20 seconds, it says here – I could have sworn that the LCD read-out on the ticket machine briefly displayed the image of Jacob Marley, who, as we all know, is as dead as a doornail.

Clearly, it's all complete rubbish.

I speak as someone who has indulged in a spot of genuine ghost-hunting. I once stayed, on successive nights, in three of the allegedly most haunted houses in England, Scotland and Wales, and I honestly wouldn't recommend the experience to my worst enemy. I left each one in great haste pursued by every demon that has ever dwelt within the minds of men. So I consider myself well qualified to comment on these matters.

And while I love a good fireside chiller as much as anyone, I'm afraid purpleparking's just doesn't stand up. 'When the airport has shut down for the night and we have said goodbye to our last customer, an eerie calm descends,' they say. This is not because the vacant spaces are stalked by unquiet souls who could have sworn they'd asked for a VAT receipt but now can't find it. It's because everyone has gone home.

Undeterred, however, paranormalparking's marketing boss
Steve Waller has adopted the mantle of an opium-addled Victorian novelist. 'Looking for inspiration while working late in the office I have taken a walk around the compound and twice caught the fleeting impression of people talking,' he writes. 'But heard as if through a wall.' It may be a piece of undigested airline food etc. At least he resisted the urge to say it was a dark and stormy night.

Now
PD James, she's one who could summon the dead hand of mortal dread with a story about a haunted dolls' house or whatever. And
Dickens recognised that the lonely signalman, marooned in his box, deep in a damp cutting and with nought but a chipped tin mug and the fevered workings of his consumptive imagination for company, was simply asking for a visitation from the other world.

But car parks just aren't scary. The bloke in charge usually has a modern hut with a telly, a telephone, a radiator and tea- and coffee-making facilities. He's hardly a soul in torment, and if he has an idle moment he will probably watch a repeat of
Top Gear
rather than allow his mind to dwell on aspects of the occult.

Mind you, to be fair, if I found myself in purplepark-ing's lot late at night and I came upon the marketing director wandering around, wearing the chains he forged in life, and trying to dream up new promotional initiatives for what is, when all's said and done, just a car park, I might be slightly disturbed.

Late last night I rang purpleparking's office to see if there was Anybody There, and to ask if there was any substance to this story, or if it was just a desperate ploy to hoodwink unsuspecting motoring columnists in quality broadsheet newspapers. I was assured by a voice, rising as if from the tomb, that the unexplained events at their Southall operation were a very serious business.

Well, I'm sorry, but I just don't believe in PR. The simple fact is that the car and its
related service industries have never, to my knowledge, yielded a decent ghost story. There have been phantom ships, ghost trains, aerial carriages hauled by demented skeletal horses. But a quick perusal of my gazetteer of British hauntings has revealed not a single apparitional Austin Seven with a headless driver pulling noiselessly into a business car park to the abject terror of its attendants.

The car park is too new, too temporal and just too mundane to invoke the spirit world, real or imagined. The worst you're likely to confront is the spectre of an expired credit card at the exit barrier.

This weekend, I've come out. Sorry to hit you with it so bluntly, but there really is no easy way to admit to being gay even in this era of rampant inclusiveness.

I realise, too, that no one really wants to read a lot of cloying self-analysis from someone who can't accept, in the post-Wilde era, that it's of no real interest to anyone. No – I mention it simply because there is an important message for the modern motorist within all this.

I also wish to make it absolutely bloody clear, right here in paragraph three, that I'm not really gay at all, and that I've simply been coerced by circumstance into a temporary gay lifestyle experience. On the other hand, I'm forced to admit that there's a lot to be said for it.

It all began on Friday afternoon when, with a tra-la-la, Woman departed the May household to spend a weekend in Italy with her posh mates. Nothing too debilitating about that. Not being one of these useless modern men, I can cook, clean, shop and make my own entertainment.

But then my mate Colin rang to say his wife had left him for the weekend as well. Regular readers may remember Colin is a bloke who never puts spanners back in their proper place in the toolbox. I invited him round and we immediately set to work stripping and rebuilding the back end of an old motorcycle.

Obviously, this quickly degenerated into a huge barney over the number of tools left lying on the floor, but because we're chaps it was all soon forgotten, with no hard feelings, so we went to the pub to play darts.
Then we had a huge curry, came home, cracked open a bottle of chilled Orvieto and settled down on the sofa together to watch
Where Eagles Dare.

By the end of this we were in a bit of a state and it made sense for Colin to stay over. So I installed him in the spare room with a copy of
GQ
and went to bed.

The next day, over a gargantuan breakfast in the nearby cafe, we had to acknowledge that, bar the sleeping arrangements, we had become a bit gay. But since we were enjoying it, we thought we might as well carry on. The warm bosom of womanhood has much to recommend it, yet there is a unique bond between men that dare not speak its name but will compel them to go over the top together for sheer love of camaraderie. Also, and despite being a bit of a clean queen, I found I didn't really care what Colin had done to the towels in the downstairs bathroom.

And so, after watching the aerial combat scenes in
Battle of Britain
(while fast-forwarding through that tedious bit where Susannah York prances around in her pants), we went shopping.

We – I mean I – needed some new crockery and several other items for the home. Now I have always regarded any form of cohabitation as rather unnatural, and balked at those tiresome conventions of domesticity that manifest themselves in a mealy-mouthed desire for co-ordinated housewares. But in a famous department store I was struck by how much more pleasurable this sort of thing is as a couple, and by the realisation that greater love hath no man than this, that he lay down his spare time to help his special friend choose some poncy plates. Colin even bought me a pub lunch.

I realised, though, that our diet was sorely lacking in Omega B supplements and free radical scavengers. On the way home we diverted to a supermarket, where I bought the ingredients for dinner while Colin had a free-trade cappuccino in a nearby coffee bar, in case anybody saw us. That evening, after another round of killer on the
Cross Keys
oche, I cooked my partner free-range shepherd's pie with a medley of organic vegetables, washed down with a couple of bottles of a robust burgundy. By now we were beyond the point where the subject of staying over even had to be raised, and after watching
Cross of Iron
over a few large whiskies, we went to our separate beds.

The next morning, while Colin knocked up some crumpets, we decided we'd earned a proper day out. An air display in Wiltshire sounded promising. It was a fine day, we could take a picnic and a blanket and I could do the crossword lying in the sun (although Colin doesn't like this because he says it means I won't talk to him). We could also enjoy a pleasant drive in the country.

And here we arrived at the acid test of our relationship; the equivalent, in a normal heterosexual coupling, of that first audible fart. Could we, as two grown men now totally comfortable in each other's company, drive through London in my Boxster with the roof down?

No.

As a schoolboy, I found car design rather frustrating. Long before the days of the laptop and laser printer, all we had was the squared paper in the back of a maths exercise book and the coveted Oxford Mathematical Instruments Set in its burnished metal tin.

The hours we spent on this sort of thing! You knew that car design had taken an unhealthy precedent over algebra when the two met somewhere forward of the staples in the middle of the book, which was always difficult to explain when you were sent to the stock room for a new one.

But there was something about the design language of the mid-'70s, the tyranny of graph paper and the obvious limitations of a plastic set-square, that led the artless youth inevitably to a Volvo
244 or the early
Lotus Esprit. Pages of them.

Later, there was real engineering drawing, with a much greater range of drawing tools and much bigger pieces of paper. Yet it was still pretty difficult once you deviated from the rectilinear and attempted anything as curvaceous as a car. And because it was something of a matter of kudos to have the hardest pencil in the school – I had an 8H – most of my designs ended up in slices.

Back at home, there was always
Lego. Lego was great for aeroplanes, with the eighter and fourer blocks being staggered to give the semblance of a fuselage and the flat plates forming wings. It was also good for waterline models of supertankers: the superstructure of these things is essentially blocky.

Still, not much cop for cars, though, and the problem is one of resolution. A boy's small box of Lego bricks is to car design what Teletext is to cartography (see the weather pages). To render a convincing curve, or even the suggestion of one, you need to make an enormous model out of thousands of blocks; with just a few dozen even the Lotus is impossible. It's why digital cameras have millions of pixies in them. It's also why the Lego Pudsey Bear at the BBC
Children in Need
office is about four feet high. The reason his face and ears have been slightly remodelled is because I became bored and consequently drunk at a BBC party.

But now I have discovered – and about 30 years late, as with most things in my life –
Lego Technic. It's not really like normal Lego at all; more a sophisticated plastic Meccano, with myriad connectors, beams, shafts, gears, motors, wheels, springs and so on. It all clips together, avoiding the misery of sore fingers from endless nut-and-bolt work.

On my desk I have my completed Lego Technic Ferrari, all 18.5 inches and 719 components of it. The box declares that it is suitable for anyone over the age of eight, which I am.

The beauty of it is this: where normal Lego failed to allow me complete self-expression where the shape of cars was concerned, Lego Technic allows me complete liberty to build the guts of them. This is much more interesting, in my opinion, since styling is essentially about fashion, but the stuff inside is engineering. Spaceframes or chassis can be made in almost infinite variety. There are wishbones and suspension parts,
stub axles and a steering rack. There is a V10 engine whose tiny crankshaft and pistons can be viewed moving through transparent cylinders, and as these cylinder units are genuinely modular and the crank is a built-up item, the motor can be rebuilt in other configurations.

There is even a differential: not a representation of one, but a
miniature working version of the real thing that must be assembled. It's brilliant and genuinely educational, since a differential is impossible to explain to, and even harder to draw for, anyone who asks how one works. Here it is, in plastic. I've heard amateur child psychologists and enthusiasts of
'creative play' claim that all this is too much for young people, but I disagree. Children are brilliant at this sort of thing. It's why Victorian Britain prospered – we put them in factories.

Being spiritually not much more than eight, I've started dismantling the Ferrari in the belief that I can improve it. Being in reality more like 43 and with fading eyesight, I probably can't. But maybe somebody with a satchel somewhere can.

We know that the engineers Moulton and Issigonis tinkered endlessly with Meccano in designing a certain revolutionary small car. Lego Technic is not ultimately quite as versatile as Frank Hornby's famous constructional toy, but it's not far off and much more finger-friendly than the old metal stuff.

And that's why you should buy Lego Technic for your kids. Somewhere in this pile of plastic parts is the next Mini.

Sally-Ann Naylor, assuming that's your real name, you look like a nice gal, with your summery floral skirt and your big cuddly jummy with the floppy collar, and that explosive smile with the perfect teeth at its epicentre. I like you already.

But have you really paid £499 for the
number plate SN05 SAN, just because it features your initials? Who's going to know? You'd have to be buying £500-worth of ammunition for a known gun psychopath before that looked like a sensible purchase. You S1 LLY B1 TCH.

And look,
Robbie Paul Arnott: you might otherwise be a good bloke to take to the pub. I admire your flagrant disregard for the conventions of smart dress and your comedy haircut. But since you've spent £499 on RA05 RPA, I've decided that you're a bit of a SAD 61T.

Elsewhere, I've seen an advert from the
DVLA showing a man in a mud-caked stripey shirt clutching the registration plate RU04 GBY. I hope people pull up next to him at traffic lights and say, 'Hey, I bet you play ruohfourgby.' Daft BUG 63R.

Thanks to the selfless efforts of my ancestors, I am not a number. I am a free man. Yet these days it seems you're nobody unless you're someone on your number plate. If only my parents had been blessed with the foresight to have me christened JAM 3S.

Getting hold of a personalised registration number used to be a complicated and expensive business. If I remember it rightly, you had to acquire the remains, or
at least the identity, of the complete car bearing the number you wanted. For this reason a lonely crofter living in the wilderness with his Austin
Seven reg JM 1 would one day find himself accosted by some terrifying captain of industry in a Rolls-Royce offering him £20,000 for his car. So the old system had a sort of self-regulating mechanism built into it; it cost big money and it had to be something really good to warrant the trouble and expense.

But the whole number-plate business has been liberated, with the inevitable result that some purveyors of 'distinctive marks' are taking the P155 NOW. I note that 2 XX is up for sale at a staggering £29,950. Unless both your names are Xavier, why would you want this? What does it say about you, other than that you have more MON 3Y than S3 NSE? And why would you want the registration number A740 BMW? If you own a BMW 740, it will already say as much on the bootlid.

Every T110 MAS, Dl CKS or HAR 13Y wants a personalised registration plate these days, and with catastrophic results. Some of the offerings currently advertised in my pile of car mags are just plain cringeworthy. Does R19 MEO look like 'romeo' to you? It does? May I suggest you stop driving immediately. Does J4 DFS really say 'Jade's'? MYA 35E it does. Do you expect people to be impressed? I'm going to think you simply can't SPE 1L.

Look, Mr
P Gent: paying several thousand pounds for P9 ENT is a grave M15 TAK, because a 9 does not look like a G even through the wrong bit of your bifocals. And if you happen to be called Barry, I would
counsel against buying 134 RRY because that's not your name. It's not even a word. And when people find out you spent £9,995 on it they're going to think that YOU 51R are a bit of a TOS 53R.

Viz
comic once famously pointed out that it was much cheaper to change your name to match the number plate you already had than fork out for a personalised one. I've come up with another idea. I'm going to claim that the letters in my registrations are actually clever acronyms. Thus the Bentley's, TOY 102W, means 'Tiller Of Yacht' and the SPF 856R on the Jag advises of a 'Suspicious Puddle in Footwell'.

On second thoughts, this is a RUB 15H idea. I've also noticed that the Bentley's number looks like it could be meant as a personalised one, so I'll have to write to
Classic Nouveau Registrations and request something completely meaningless instead. This is going to be a tough call for an organisation that thinks SA02 RAH says 'Sarah'.

There is no more tragic testimony to our society's self-obsession than the personalised number plate. If you really think I need to know that your name's Terry, just get a big felt tip and write 'T3rry' on the rear bumper. Unless you're the stationery magnate I once met who had the registration number A4 PAD, no one is going to be impressed.

Please, please stop it. It's not B1 GOR C13 VER.