More Randomness

Eoin tagged me for the 8 random things meme, and I’ve been inspired by his facts to focus mine all on cars and driving this time.

1. I come from a family who bonded with their cars. They were all given names and treated as petrol relatives and kept shiny clean inside and out. I remember very well the pale blue Lancia called Sophia that my mother adored, and I remember the period when we had a car that she didn’t like, and unsurprisingly its name (if it was ever graced with one) escapes me. The most important thing to me as a child was the material on the back seat; I can vividly recall the courage it required to sit down when wearing shorts on a plastic back seat of a car that has stood out in the summer sun.

2. At the age of 11 I managed to shut my thumb in the car door of the Lancia. This struck me as such a stupid thing to have done that it would be better not to mention it to my parents. I then rather spoiled the effect by nearly passing out halfway down the street from the shock and the pain.

3. My 17^th birthday present was driving lessons and I was taught by a long-suffering chap, named Derek, who had also taught my brother. It took me a while to learn as I’m not the most practical person but I passed my test on the first attempt and do love to drive. I get very claustrophobic in cars now when I’m a passenger, but I feel it far less when I’m at the wheel. Getting into a car full of people to ’share a lift’ may well be good for the environment but I emerge from the experience as a nervous wreck.  I’d rather drive a formula one race.

4. My first car was a red Fiat Panda that I took to France with me. It was a cutie but not what you’d call superpowered. My top speed, pedaling hard going downhill in the slipstream of a lorry was about 65 mph. I would be battling it out in the slow lane with Reliant Robins and milk floats.

5. The first accident I had occurred when I was transporting five friends (for maximum humiliation) and myself in my small Peugeot to a party. We’d all left from work, bundled into my car and I made the fatal error of changing my mind as I was reversing out of the parking space. It was one of those car parks bristling with concrete pillars, and moving at a graceful 2mph I mashed the front of the car into one. And so I learned that cars are not in fact made of strong steel, but of tin foil and a lot of starch.

6. Road rage really alarms me and you see it everywhere. Too many people are not respectful on the roads anymore and driving is just too dangerous an activity to accommodate hot heads and maniacs. It’s an indication of a deep malaise in society, I think. Also, the road network in this country is becoming impossible; it’s hard to get through a journey without hitting roadworks or an accident. All of which diminishes the pleasure of driving and makes me long for the days when fewer people owned cars and the roads were far more pleasant places to be.

7. I drove my Fiat Panda home from France, a trip which took two days. I chose to stop overnight in Tours and congratulated myself on finding the kind of dungeon-like lock up garage I’ve never come across anywhere else, where you can leave your car in high security overnight. Seeing as my life in France was contained in the car I thought this a wise move. Until it transpired that Tours was hosting a conference that weekend and there was a proverbial lack of rooms at the inns. And then I thought with regret of my car disappearing on some huge revolving platform behind thick concrete doors, not to be accessed until 8am the following morning.

8. My most alarming car experience was getting into what was for me the passenger seat of an automatic car in L.A., on my own, and heading off on the wrong side of the road into the complicated network of freeways with jet lag. Trying to read the map as I went along didn’t help either. The car and I both survived the experience although I don’t want to have to concentrate that hard too many times in my life.