THE DRIVE OF YOUR LIFE
A car should be a tool that helps you live the life you want — not a status symbol that gives you something to brag about or worship
My mate Steve has bought a Porsche. I can’t tell you what model it is because I don’t care and I can’t tell you what colour it is because it was dark when I pulled into he and his wife’s driveway last Saturday.
Steve loves his car. Not as much as he’d love a Tesla, which he test drove even though he couldn’t afford it (why do people do this — it’s akin to trying on a wedding dress when you don’t have a boyfriend).
Anyway, in a bid to see whether he loved his car more than his mates I told him I’d driven into the back of it. “Yeah right, sure,” he said, taking my bottle of wine.
“Steve, seriously,” I said, forcing myself to cry as per my Grade 5 drama exam where I was playing Juliet and had just found out Romeo was dead. “I’m so sorry, I hit the accelerator rather than the brake.”
You should’ve seen his face. He’s a decent bloke so he tried very hard to look forgiving, but if you remember Hillary Clinton’s first appearance after Donald Trump won the election … well, that.
“Shit, OK. Look, it’ll be all right,” he mumbled even though, like Hills and The Don, he doubtless wanted to strangle me with my own hair.
I told him I was kidding, upon which he proceeded to drink my bottle of red in one gulp.
I don’t understand car people. I don’t get why they’d spend a house deposit or the equivalent of 10 summer holidays to The Seychelles (20 to New Zealand) on what is effectively a rubbish skip on wheels.
I think what Jeremy Clarkson wrote last week about some new German vehicle applies to most cars: “I have driven the latest Audi Q5 and can think of absolutely nothing interesting to say about it,” he opined. “It’s a well-made box that costs some money and produces some emissions and, frankly, I’d rather use Uber.”
Transport, like underpants, is one of those dull necessities of life made even more dull by talking about it. Cars are a means to an end, they are meat and three veg, they’re the deathly boring hobby of choice for the moneyed and mulletted.
That said, at least your average bogan does something with his car such as race it or smash it or tinker with it. The bankers just talk about it, which I suppose brings some relief from share tips and who’s been done for insider trading.
My disinterest in cars stems from Sunday drives with my grandparents. Quite why anyone thought a 12-year-old might be interested in “seeing where the new motorway is going in” baffles me, but see it we did, with nary an iPhone or a fidget spinner for distraction. I distinctly remember a discussion over the colour of Jack and Peg’s new Commodore — “cappuccino” — which cemented my suspicion that adults really were boring since the car was unquestionably a noxious shade of tan.
My first car was a Datsun Sunny (brown) followed by a Ford Escort (cream) and then, in London, a Fiat Uno (red over copious patches of rust). I can’t tell you anything about them except I kissed in one, had sex in another and copped a stack of parking fines in the third.
The only significance of those cars was that they took me places: camping, beaches, parties and along all the glorious meandering B roads in Europe. I once got stuck in a motorway traffic jam in the Fiat and, desperate for a wee, relieved myself in a large McDonalds soft drink cup I found languishing under the passenger seat. In those moments I’m glad I don’t have a Porsche. Indeed when Bec Judd recently revealed she’d had to relieve herself in the car using one of her kid’s super-absorbent nappies my only thought was, “I hope she doesn’t have a flash car”.
The trouble with smart cars is there’s always someone with something smarter. When my friend Sarah bought an MX5 in our 20s she was deeply put out when a new boyfriend said she couldn’t park it in his driveway. It looked like a “hairdresser’s car” he explained and he didn’t want it parked next to his Merc.
The other trouble with posh cars is you have to look after them. While my Honda CRV — I keep buying them on the grounds I know where the buttons are — is a cesspit of water bottles, shin pads, newspapers and stray almonds, you can’t similarly mistreat a BMW. Gosh no, you’d have to blow-dry a BMW as per the recent advice from Auto Express that you get out your Babyliss Pro because it blows water droplets out of “hidden areas such as door handles and lights”.
Bollocks to that, laughs a friend, who recently started seeing a bloke who drives a station wagon. She has no idea what make of car it is but she loves that the boot is constantly loaded with surfboards, golf clubs, fishing rods and damp towels. I ask what colour it is. “White,” she says. “Shame,” I tell her, quoting recent statistics revealing 77 per cent of cars sold in 2016 were white, silver, grey or black. “If it was orange he’d be a keeper.”