All My Cars: 1980 - 2019

I passed my driving test in February 1979. In rough chronological order my cars have been:

Fiat 850
Saab 900
Lancia Fulvia
Vauxhall Cavalier 2.0 (1991/2)
VW Polo
Volvo V40 (2000/1)
Ford Ka
Renault Clio
Fiat Punto 1.4 Active
Fiat Punto 1.2 Pop Star

The first three were end-of-lifers: I was the last owner. Those were my 1980’s cars. The Cavalier and the V40 were company cars. The Ka got thumped in the boot by another driver in something like 2008, and I swear I found the Clio in a dealership somewhere in south-west England. I do remember a couple of blokes driving it up to deliver. Trade plates and all. The Clio got flooded, though I can’t find the blog post, in about 2010, and then the Punto Active got hit this year.

The Cavalier was a 2 litre automatic and changed my driving style forever. Everyone should drive a bigger-engined automatic at least once for a few months. What I can’t believe is that I ran the family Polo for eight years in the 1990’s when I was unemployed. But I sure didn’t have the money to buy even a beater in those days.

All boring stuff. I live in the suburbs, don’t travel much, my let’s-go-somewhere-two-hundred-miles-away-for-the-weekend days are over, and I regard cars as tools. Not as status symbols.

Let’s hope no-one drives into the new Punto for at least ten years. Please.

My very first car - in that colour

Buying the Replacement Car

Car Giant having failed as a source of the kind of second-hand car I look for, I looked on the internet. Fiat Puntos with low mileages don’t fill a page, and there was one in West Molesey that was exactly what I was looking for. Phone call to establish it was still available, appointment for 09:00 Saturday morning to look at it.

The car was fine, though the battery was out-of-condition and they replaced it for me. If I had driven it straight away I might not have found that out. I found out because I had to park it up so I could return the rental car.

The logistics were a bit involved: Rental car from home to West Molesey. Buy car. Call AA insurance to get it insured. Drive rental from West Molesey to rental office in Hanworth, stopping to fill tank with petrol, and return car. Call cab firm for taxi back to West Molesey. Battery not yet fixed, walk up road for a coffee and toasted. Walk back to car sales place. Collect car. Drive to Sainsbury’s in Hampton to do shopping

How much did all this cost?

Visit to Car Giant: £0 (Thank you 60+ card)
Car itself: £2,995
Car rental: £110
Taxi from rental: £20
Lost fuel in old car: £25
Payment from Insurance company: £667
Net: £2,483

So because someone didn’t look where they were going when doing a three-point turn, I’m out £2,500.

Okay, so ‘shit happens’. The catch is that usually the shit costs one party way more than the other. In this case the guy who drove into me will face higher insurance charges - if he’s even insured, but nothing like what I’m out. He’s just going to have higher insurance premiums for a couple of years. Had he been driving a car, he might have had a more expensive time of it, but he was driving a solid metal trailer van with what amounted to battering rams on the back, so his vehicle is unaffected.

So now I have a new second-hand car. It’s the size and style I want, and from the little driving I’ve done, the 1.2 engine makes a slightly more sluggish drive than the 1.4 in the previous Punto.

Why We’re Helpless When Things That Don’t Go Wrong Finally Go Wrong

There should be a snappy title for the law that states: the longer any given thing in your life works, the less competent you will be at fixing it when it goes wrong.

Contrast:

Ten years ago you found a decent plumber to put in the gas boiler. Then the boiler goes. The plumber isn’t working any more, and you have no idea where to find another one

Vs

Every six months something happens to one of the damn pipes in your house. Like mice can eat copper or something. You have three currently active plumbers in your phone. People you know ask you to recommend plumbers.

It’s also known as the I used to know how to do this, but I haven’t had to for years effect.

Two out three of the last cars I’ve had were from Car Giant: a Ford Ka and the Fiat Punto. In the middle was a Renault Clio that I bought from a dealer in a town in south-west (say Swindon, though I don’t think it was) because I happened to pass it when I was in the town on business. I look for a low-mileage, previous model of a mainstream car: The Ka, a Renault Clio, then the Fiat Punto. The fact that it’s the previous model means it’s a lot cheaper than the latest model, even if only six months older, for the same mileage.

This time round Car Giant failed me. Totally. Utterly. In the nine years since I bought the Punto, they seem to have adopted a policy of only selling the latest model and no older than three years. Minimum price £5,500 (+£150 ‘admin fee’). Main price range £6,500 - £9,500. For a supermini (Corsa, Fiesta). No Puntos. For that kind of money, I want a car I really like, rather can just live with. And I am not a rear spoiler guy (Corsa). Nor do I like an instrument panel that seems to be right in my face (Fiesta). The Fiat 500 is way too small.

So that was Plan A gone.

As I trudged along the alley between Hythe Road and Willesden Junction - which is marked on the map as an un-named thick grey line, and you have not experienced the full range of what London has to offer if you haven’t walked it at least once - I realised I had no Plan B. I had no idea how the heck one buys previous-model, low mileage cars in +TheCurrentYear.

Why would I? The one I had would still be going strong if that guy hadn’t backed into it.

The better your life works, and the longer it works well, the less resources you will have to fix it when stuff starts to break.

Joker - The Movie

Are there two versions of this film? One that the American reviewers saw, and the one I saw recently at my local Cineworld?

This is not the Ultimate White Anger movie. That remains the remarkable 1993 movie Falling Down, directed by Joel Schumacher and starring Michael Douglas. “I’m the bad guy? How’d that happen?” Douglas’ character D-Fens is stone cold sane and sober. He knows exactly what he’s doing, which makes his anger and actions so much more significant. Want to know what Whitey looks like when he gets angry? He looks like D-Fens: it’s deliberate, it’s not pretty, and it’s not backstory.

Joker is backstory: of one of the most well-known baddies in cinema and comics. As that, it is excellent. Unrelenting, intense, gripping, sloshing between wince-making bathos and shocking violence, with a central performance the like of which comes along once a decade.

Joker starts out being a hopeless loser living with his invalided single mother. By the time he strikes out against the three White Boy oafs on the subway, he has a psychotic break. That’s where the touching sequences with the lovely Zazie Beetz come from. I’m not sure if psychotic breaks really work like that, but comic / movie convention says they do.

He has the psychosis because he can’t accept what he’s done. Only Big Bad People kill, and he’s not a Big Bad Person. He’s a loser who idolises Robert de Niro’s TV comedian - some reviewers got very carried away with The King of Comedy references, forgetting that large amounts of cultural appropriation is allowed in comics to ease the creative strain.

However, back in the movie, times are so bad that the majority of the population think that a man who kills three asshole Wall Street guys is pretty much a hero. People show up at protests wearing clown masks.

What do you get when you cross a mentally-ill loner with a society that abandons him and treats him like trash? You get what you deserve...

Not quite. Most mentally-ill loners fade into oblivion, bumbling along under the influence of drugs so awful that there’s no secondary market for them. We’re very carefully told that due to budget cuts Joker can’t get his perfunctory counselling and the bottles of drugs he needs to stay doped-and-functional. He’s off his meds. Literally. His psychosis is over - no more hallucinations involving Zazie Beetz; he has literally killed the source of his dysfunctions (watch the movie to understand that remark); and he is now a conscious moral actor. He is only crazy like a fox.

I used to think that my life was a tragedy, but now I realize, it's a comedy

A comedy can be about laughs, but it can also be a play characterized by its humorous or satirical tone and its depiction of amusing people or incidents, in which the characters ultimately triumph over adversity. Joker’s life is that kind of comedy: he triumphs over adversity by becoming a criminal without intent. Which is, of course, the conclusion the film has to reach.

Is there an action take-away from the movie for incels and the downtrodden, ignored and reviled?

If there is, it’s ditch the distractions, the meds, the cliched counselling and advice because those are hiding the real world from you, and you from the real world. Then strike back at those who hurt you. At that point you can see why SJWs would start to get worried. And then Drop out of the economy and live off illegal earnings. Which would get agreement from the Invisible Committee.

Is it me, or is it getting crazier out there?

It’s not you. It is getting crazier out there, and the Wokeful and the SJWs are the ones making it crazier.

However, that’s not why the Wokeful circled round Joker. They knew from the Venice Film Festival that Joker was going to be received as one of the best films of the decade. No matter what anyone said, it would make a profit. It would get audiences. So the Wokeful hitched on to Joker's star to get the publicity for their causes.

It’s a good comic-book movie. I’d put it right up there with Watchmen.

The Last Couple of Weeks

On Wednesday 18th September I told the boss I was fading fast and would take the laptop home. I spent the next six or so days sleeping badly, coughing compulsively and trying to blow my nose. On Monday 23rd I did my morning routine tasks and then told the boss I was signing off for the day. I didn’t really feel better until Thursday, when I worked at home, then went to the gym in the evening. I went back to work on Monday 30th and had an early evening. I went to the gym on Tuesday and to my meeting for the first time in three weeks on Wednesday.

On the way back, a gentleman from Bulgaria (from the format of his registration number) reversed his truck into my Fiat Punto’s front wing while doing a three-point turn. He ran into the front offside wing and also pushed the front tyre and suspension inwards. Car can’t be driven any distance. I parked up, we swapped details, and I walked the half-a-mile or so back home.

And got the worst night’s sleep I’ve had for a long, long time. I was wasted the next morning. Thursday morning I spent an hour on the phone to my insurance agent, repeating the same details again to the insurer, who said without a blink “his fault”. It seems it’s the job of people doing a three-point turn to watch what they are doing, not ours to watch out for them.

Thursday afternoon, I blew off the gym because I wasn’t feeling too hot. I had an uncomfortable train ride back, at one point needing to stand in the open doors to cool down. Yep. When I got home, I threw up. It wasn’t food poisoning, thank heaven, because that for me can be horrendous and involves going to hospital. I went to bed about half-past eight, if not earlier.

Friday I managed to do some work from home. I thought I was feeling okay. I had forgotten that my insurance is fully comprehensive and includes a hire car for the time between the accident and the insurance company making an offer, and a nice Chinese girl with an English good-school accent from Enterprise delivered a car on Friday morning.

Saturday I had all sorts of good intentions, which were abandoned when I felt queazy after breakfast. It was the most unproductive and ridiculous day I’ve had in ages. I think it was about some kind of recuperation.

I gave up on going into town because South West trains were doing maintenance work, and so was a lot of the District Line. My Higher Power intended that I rest.

Sunday has been better. I haven’t been out and about, but I haven’t been falling asleep on my couch every twenty minutes either. I went for a walk round my local Air Park, then ran up in the nice hire car to put the key in the exhaust of my Punto, so that the men from a garage with a Southampton (!) telephone number can come and collect it.

I bought the Punto in February 2010, so I’ve had it for nine and a half years. I’d prefer to have had it for another nine-and-a-half to be honest, but where would Western Capitalism be if we all did things like that? So I’ll be off to Car Giant in White City to get a replacement in about a week or so. There’s no question that the insurance company will write the Punto off. I’ll bet suspension units and coachwork cost more than the re-sale value of the car. Someone who knew what they were doing would probably fix it up for around a couple of hundred quid excluding labour.

I reckon I lose around 10%-15% of my life on colds and feeling poorly. Every year. I notice it more now I’m sober and do more with my days than I did when I was drinking.

I have no resolutions to deal with this. It’s just what happens, and I have at least one more cold between now and Christmas, usually just after half-term. Some of that is age: just as I lose the ability to recover fast, I lose the ability to carry on while not-feeling-my-best. But you call me and want to discuss something work-related and I’m on it during the call. Then I fall off again. It’s the self-starting bit I can’t do. Maybe I should schedule all my meetings for when I’m ill.

By The River

The Millennium Bridge and its view up and down the River Thames is just over a ten-minute walk from my office - once I have waited for however long for a lift to the ground floor. For a long time, it may as well as have been ten hours away. I haven’t been there for a long time. Last week I decided to walk there. Seeing “my London” - the river, the Tate Modern, Tower Bridge, the South Bank, the tourists - I could feel a tension I didn’t know was there starting to unwind. It helped that the sun was out and the sky was blue.

When I worked on Shaftesbury Avenue, I would cross the river every day. It made me feel like I was there, in London. I used to like walking to Holborn in the morning, until they closed it to incoming passengers because escalator works, exactly because it took me across the river.

Staircases; Barbican and White Lion Hill

Barbican

From Paul's Walk to White Lion Hill