Oh, sorry, you’ll be wanting some context.  Ahem.  Allow me to back up and start again.

I now have a second person on my insurance policy, and much to my wife’s disappointment it’s not her.  My friend Sarah has another driving test coming up next week and wanted to get as much practice as possible before zero-hour, so I put her on my insurance for a week as an additional named driver.  Of course, that’s meant that I’ve had to actually take her out in the car, which was pretty scary, for both of us.

Our first outing was on Tuesday, and was a first for both of us – for Sarah it was the first time she had driving any car other than her instructor’s, and for me it was the first time I had let someone else drive my car.  It took a while for Sarah to get to grips with the car, being larger and heavier and more sensitive than she’s used to.  In fact, that first trip out was pretty hairy, narrowly missing several cars and leaving me digging my fingers into the passenger seat and pressing my right foot firmly into the footwell where the brake pedal ought to be.

Thankfully though today’s outing was much more encouraging.  We went a little further afield, did some higher speeds (on the dual-carriageway), and Sarah was much more confident with her control of the car.  Which was encouraging because it means that a significant proportion of my worries from last time were down to the car rather than her driving ability.  So all is good.

It got me thinking though – could I actually be a professional driving instructor?  I do have a passion for driving, and lots of patience, and I’m usually fairly good at explaining things.  On the other hand, I am a bit of a perfectionist when it comes to driving, and I’m not sure I could cope with just sitting there and letting learner drivers ruin the clutch and the gearbox.  To be honest, I’d prefer to be in the driver’s seat than the passenger’s.  Maybe I should be a chouffeur.  Or a rally driver.  Or maybe I could sit at home and make pretty web sites.  Oh wait, I already do.

One final thing.  I can’t remember exactly how I stumbled across it, but today I found a YouTube channel that I felt compelled to subscribe to.  I’m not a huge YouTuber, and I’ve never subscribed to anything before, so that just shows how good it was.  From what I can tell it’s just this guy in Bath who films himself doing random things.  It’s absolutely hilarious, just my sort of sense of humour!  He’s got a video about how to make the perfect cup of tea, which (appropriately) I watched while drinking a cup of tea.  So if your randomness levels are on a temporary low, check out charlieissocoollike.  It’s worth five minutes of your life.  It really is.

The reason for that introduction stems from my experience in the last half an hour, where I had to pick Sarah up from work and deliver her to the university campus where she was catching a coach, as fast as possible.  Not because Sarah was late, but because I forgot.  She had organised this with me several days ago, and yesterday evening I went round to her house so she could put a bag in my boot to save her worrying about it today.  And yet, somehow, I completely forgot about it until 10 minutes after I was supposed to have picked her up.  Grrr.

Some might put this down to the fact that my wife is at work and thus unable to remind me of what’s going on.  Some might just attribute it to me being a muppet.  But if I’m honest I can’t really pin the blame on Ellie, whom I’ve seen only briefly recently, as ships passing in the night – almost literally (she gets in from work around 11:30pm, and leaves the following morning at some unearthly hour).  On this occasion, it just completely slipped my mind.  I had intended on setting an alarm, aware as I was of my tendency to lose track of time and space, but clearly I’d forgotten to set the alarm.  So it was only when Sarah called me at 4:10pm asking if I was lost that I realised what day it was, what time it was, and how the laws of mathematics had ensured that those ten minutes would be subtracted from the time I had left to get to Greenstead.

On the plus side, it did give me my first chance to drive my new car in anger.  I’m not saying I completely flouted the traffic laws, but I’ll admit I gave it some welly where I could.  The Ford Escort GhiaX has a respectable 1.8 litre engine, pumping out a good 150bhp on a good day.  The brakes are simple but effective, and give a good positive response.  However, being the luxury model rather than the sports model, the GhiaX focuses on comfort and tranquility at the cost of ultimate performance.  Yes, the large-bore engine does develop a good wallop of power, but only when you get the revs right up, and gear changes are noticeably sloppy – more the fault of the engine than the gearbox.  Straight-line acceleration is reasonably good, considering it’s pulling a relatively heavy car, full of padding and sound-proofing and air-conditioning and suchlike, but I wouldn’t describe it as exhilarating.  Cornering is about average, with the overall setup being adequate enough to keep the car feeling safe, while not necessarily giving enough stability to be able to really hammer it through the bends.  And the exhaust sounds like a congested bee.  Albeit a rather large bee.

In conclusion, then, the Escort GhiaX is a fantastic little car for pootling around, doing the shopping, visiting grandparents, giving people lifts to the station, and soforth, but attempting anything even remotely… well, fun, the car fails to impress.  It is, after all, a Ghia, not a Cosworth.  For ferrying people from A to B it’s very comfortable and pleasing to drive, but it won’t get your heart pumping no matter how fast you drive.

And, just so you appreciate the effort I went to, Sarah did catch her coach in time.  In fact, after all that, the coach was late.

Unfortunately, having a Ford Escort as well now as my daily runner, the Mini has been left neglected in the garage.  Now, normally this would be a good thing; the garage is dry and safe, so in that sense it’s the best place for it.  What I forgot to do was disconnect the battery.  As a result, the month and a half it’s been sat stationary has drained the battery almost to its limits, the consequence being that the car won’t start.  Ordinarily, not the end of the world.  But it was supposed to be going in for its MOT today, so that’s had to be postponed until I can get the car running again.

Thankfully the garage round the corner has been very helpful, and has offered to charge the battery overnight to give it a full dose of energy.  They’ll then be able to test it to make sure it’s still working, and if it is I’ll be able to pop it back in the Mini and get it MOTed tomorrow.  If the battery is dead, I can always pop into town and buy a new battery, and still get the car MOTed tomorrow.  So it’s not the end of the world.

It’s just rather frustrating that my own negligence caused the problem in the first place.  I have to admit, I had just sort of forgotten that I had a Mini in the garage.  I did manage to get the car started briefly yesterday by bump-starting it, and had a quick drive around to make sure everything else was still working.  At first the brakes were stuck on a bit, but they soon loosened up.  What surprised me most was how fun it was – I had forgotten just how much like a go-kart the Mini is!  Of course I’ve always known this, but having been driving a ‘normal’ car for the last month and a half I had got used to its refinement and quietness.  Neddy roared and bumped along the road, loving being out on the road again.  It certainly brought a smile to my face!  And a gut-wrenching shame in putting the car up for sale.

There is a ray of hope though for Neddy’s future.  I did have someone get in touch with me the other day enquiring about the Mini, so they should be coming round on Sunday to have a look.  I’m just hoping it will have passed the MOT by then so it’ll be road-worthy, because I’m going to struggle to sell the car if they can’t take it for a test drive!

In other car news, I have also discovered a problem with the Escort.  Actually, to tell the truth, I discovered the problem a while back, but only today found the cause.  I noticed soon after buying the car that it was low on power steering fluid, so topped it up.  I did note at the time that there appeared to be some leakage around the reservoir, but couldn’t see where the leak might be.  Today I found it.  There is a pipe plugged into the top of the reservoir which, I presume, is for bringing the fluid back to the reservoir after it’s been round the system.  The clip holding the rubber pipe on clearly isn’t quite tight enough to make a good seal, and it’s leaking ever so slightly from there.  It’s not a massive problem, as it’s not exactly spurting out all over the place, but I don’t really want to be topping the fluid up every month if I can help it.  So I just need to replace the clip with something a little more adequate, and hopefully that will put that problem to rest.

I suppose it all just goes to show, all cars have problems, not just the old ones.

The car in question is a Ford Escort.  In fact, more than that, it’s a Ford Escort Ghia X, which is pretty much as posh as Escorts ever came.  It’s got such refinements as central locking, air conditioning, electric windows, heated windscreen, 6-CD multichanger, sunroof, power steering, airbags, and even a light in the boot.  A far cry from the more simple design of the Mini.  And a lot cheaper, too.

I spent most of this afternoon outside, cleaning cars, as the Escort didn’t get a clean by the previous owner before the sale went through.  So I gave it a fairly thorough clean, inside and out, and then moved onto giving Neddy a clean too.  Unfortunately this also meant changing the wheels, as I rolled the Mini out of the garage today to discover one of the rear wheels had developed a slow puncture.  Thankfully I still had the original steel wheels in the garage, so I popped along to the nearest garage in the Escort with the Mini wheels in the boot, topped them up with air and brought them back to be fitted.  It was a bit of a shame, putting Neddy back on those skinny little wheels, but I suppose at the same time it’s a bit of a godsend that I happened to have a second car with which to get to the garage in the first place.  God provides.

So, Neddy will be put up for sale.  And Ellie and I will enjoy the luxuries of a ‘normal’ car.  I did have a Fiesta a few years ago, before Neddy came on the scene, but even that was pretty basic in comparison to this.  It’s effortless, comfortable, spacious.  At least, relative to a Mini.  It’ll certainly make long distance journies easier to cope with, and will mean that I can ferry people around more easily and without them having to squeeze their way awkwardly past the front seat.  And it means we’ll be able to put a baby seat in the back, when the time comes.  And transport multiple instruments around more easily.

I’ll put some photos up in due course.  I’ll have to take some photos of Neddy anyway, to put in the adverts, but I’ll take some of the Escort as well, for reference as much as anything else.  It may not be as fun, and I’ll no doubt miss driving the Mini very soon, but I suppose it’s all just part of the process of growing up – I can no longer think just of myself.  Hello world, I’m one of you now.

Odd, then, that I should be even considering letting that car go.

Unfortunately, that’s the way life is at the moment.  Minis are great fun, and I can’t think of a car better suited to me, but in all honesty they’re not the most practical of vehicles.  For just me, it’s fine, but my wife wants to learn to drive, we want to have kids, and there just isn’t enough room in a Mini for all that.  I wouldn’t want Ellie learning to drive in a Mini, not because I’m afraid of her breaking anything, but more because I’m afraid of it breaking her – Minis don’t have crumple zones.  The inevitable upshot of that looming eventuality is that Neddy will need to go.

So I’ve been looking into what other potential cars we could buy.  We don’t want a small car, because that’s not really going to be a huge improvement over the Mini.  We don’t need anything bigger than a small estate car because we just can’t justify it at the moment.  There is certainly no need for a 4×4 or a people carrier, and as much fun as it would be to have a sports car we can’t afford it and we could probably get more shopping in the Mini.  So, we’re looking at a medium-sized family saloon, nothing special, nothing expensive, just something cheap and cheerful to satisfy all our needs.  Incidentally, this also means satisfying my undying need to have a little fun every now and then – not breaking the law, and not taking unnecessary risks all the time, I just enjoy having the option of throwing the car into a corner every now and then.

It would appear, then, that the ideal solution is a Ford Escort.  They’re cheap to buy (I’ve found decent ones for sale for around £1000), cheap to maintain (every good mechanic knows how to fix a Ford Escort), reliable, spacious enough for a small family, cheap to insure, and relatively safe.  Sure, it’s not the best car on the market, not by a long way, but for our needs it’s probably our best option.  And I trust Ford with this sort of car – I had a Fiesta as my first car, and while it wasn’t anything special, it was a good little car.

What’s surprised me most, however, is the insurance.  I’ve played around with a few insurance web sites and got a few quotes, and discovered to my relief that insuring Ellie to learn to drive isn’t going to be as expensive as we’d thought.  Because I’ve been driving for a while and built up a good no-claims bonus that puts me in good stead, and apparently the fact that we’re married also gives us additional benefits – which is the first time I’ve come across an industry that actually likes the fact that we’re married.

So, given that I can almost definitely sell Neddy for a lot more than I bought him for, we’ll have more than enough left over to pay for a second-hand Escort, cover the insurance, and pay for Ellie to have driving lessons.  That’s not bad going.  It will be sad to say good bye to my beloved little car, but thankfully none of this is actually going to happen just yet – I’ll almost certainly have the Mini at least until the end of the show season!

It’s a sobering thought that all the environmentalists’ warnings are finally coming true. I remember being told in a Biology lesson once that we would run out of fossil fuels by 2040, and I can remember thinking “ah well, that’s years off, someone will find a solution by then.” So far, no one has. If things progress in the same direction, we’re in for a tough time of it over the next few years. Oil is becoming increasingly hard to find, putting prices up both for businesses and individuals. 2040 may seem like a long way off, but the effects of the fuel crisis are beginning to be felt now.

Of all the conceivable effects, I want to focus for a moment on petrol (and diesel, by proxy). At the moment people are still buying fuel for their cars, still forking out increasingly high prices, and not really cutting back on the amount they’re using. Our usage hasn’t decreased (in fact we’re arguably using more now than ever), we’re just spending more for it. In that sense, putting the prices up isn’t saving the environment, because people are still using the fuel, they’re just paying more for it than they used to. In that sense, fuel tax has nothing to do with helping the environment, only helping the government’s pocket money fund. But the time will come when fuel prices reach an unstable amount, at which point things are going to get very scary.

At the basic level, I won’t be able to afford to drive any long distances any more. I’ll even have to think twice about driving to the shops, aiming to use the car less so that I don’t need to fill up as often. But take that a stage further and we’ll be in a situation where I won’t be able to afford to fill up unless I save up for it. Driving will become a luxury, a weekend sport. At this point, cars effectively become disposable. No one’s going to buy a car if they can’t afford to pay for the petrol. The result will be an unprecedented number of abandoned cars rusting in people’s driveways, obsolete, unused, dead.

There are other consequences too, of course, that affect not just me in my own little world but everyone in the country, our way of life. If we can’t afford to run our cars, then businesses similarly won’t be able to run their lorries transporting food, clothes, oil, books, and whatever else lorries carry today. Local shops will shut from lack of products being delivered to them. Farms will suffer from not being able to have their produce transported away, and no one will be able to afford to pay the farmers anyway.

We will essentially be looking at a period of time where travel is no longer a part of life, but a luxury for the few who can still afford it. We will no longer have the assurance of 24-7 electricity, and gas prices will be prohibitively high too. That poses problems with heating, and will affect pensioners and young adults alike. I wouldn’t call it the Dark Ages exactly, more like the Grey Ages.

Contrasting against that is the height of technology we have achieved in recent years. Computers have got faster and cleverer and smaller, but they only work if they have electricity to power them. Again, who’s going to buy a new laptop if they can’t afford the electricity to power it?

It’s a pretty grim outlook, and not one I’m looking forward to. Is there any way of avoiding it? I’m not sure that there is. There are small things we can do to help, but at the moment there is nothing on the horizon that will solve all our problems in one fell swoop. And maybe that’s a good thing. We’ve got used to using energy freely and carelessly, maybe we need something like this to make us sit up and change the way we live our lives.

On the fuel front, there are no ideal solutions at the moment. Electric cars don’t have a non-existant carbon footprint, because we still have to get the electricity from somewhere, and technology still hasn’t progressed far enough that it can completely replace conventional internal combustion engines. Hybrid cars are all very well in concept, but in practice rarely achieve mpg figures high enough to have a noticeable impact. Then there are hydrogen cells and suchlike, which are clever but complicated, and will have difficulty getting off the ground.

In the house, we will have to think carefully about what energy we’re using. Using energy saving lightbulbs is a good start, but we also need to think about how we use windows (i.e. closing them to keep warmth in rather than relying on the central heating), how we cook food (putting food together rather than using all the rings on the hob at once), where and how we use electricity (not just the age-old ‘tv on standby’ issue, but things like boiling the kettle, using the microwave, leaving the computer on, charging up all our phones and powering all our electrical devices).

When it comes to life beyond the front door, we’ll need to think about where our food comes from, how far it’s travelled, how far we have to go to get it, how much energy has gone into packaging. An emphasis will need to be put on buying local produce rather than stuff imported from other countries, even other parts of this country.

Perhaps it wouldn’t be a bad thing for us to go back a few decades, live in an era where gardens are for growing our own food, where people meet together to share a TV, where lights go out after 10pm save for a few candles.

I’d like to think that I’m reasonably energy-conscious, but I’ve been thinking today that a 1275cc engine in my Mini is a bit of a waste – a smaller, more efficient 998 would probably be better. At a guess I reckon Neddy runs at about 25mpg, possibly 30 on a good day. Compare that to Lulu, the 998 Mini City I learnt to drive in, which got nearer 55mpg – that’s more than most modern cars can boast.

I hate to be a harbinger of bad news, but life is unlikely to smoothly from here on in. How will we survive? What are we prepared to do to continue living? It’ll be a bumpy ride, that much I’m sure of…

And it was on this day that I went with Colchester Mini Club to the Manningtree High School Classic Vehicle Show.  Not restricted to just Minis, there were cars of all sorts in attendance, all (or at least most) shined up and tidied to be on show.  Photos of the event are in my new Picasa album.

Vintage Classics

There were the traditional classics – Wolseleys, a Rolls Royce Silver Shadow, a lovely Bentley.  Old cars with narrow wheels and wooden brakes, with about as much horse power as… well, a couple of horses really.  These cars show us something of the origins of the motor car, how form followed function and unnecessary styling was mostly left out.  The technical simplicity (relative to today’s modern engines) is punctuated by the sublime beauty of the hand-crafted design, a remnant of the sort of creative engineering that characterised the Victorian era and the industrial revolution.  A glimpse of an old Rolls Royce engine shows it to be full of shining metal, carefully and artistically arranged to produce the desired result – a six cylinder engine made up of two cylinder blocks, each cylinder having two spark plugs.  It was amazing.  Awe-inspiring.  And I’m glad technology has moved on.

Mid-classics

That brings me to the next era of classic cars – the Jaguar E-type, Ford Cortina mk1, Morris Minor, MG Midget, Ford Consul, and of course the Mini.  These cars are not all brilliant, in fact some are downright aweful, yet they reflect the state of society at that time.  Cars were no longer for the rich and famous, but were for everyone.  Your average family could have a car.  And they did.  Function had to work its way around form, engineers having to work double-time to work out how to make the car work despite the crazy ideas the designers were passing them, all striving for cars that looked stylish and modern.

Modern classics

Finally, there is another class of classic cars, and one that in many ways is controvercial by its mere existence – the modern classics.  The Ford Capri of the 80s only just makes it into this category, being somewhat old now, alongside such cars from the 90s and 00s as the Honda Civic, Ford Sierra Cosworth, Cheverolet Corvette, Ford Mustangs.  There is no doubt that some of these cars are fantastic cars, groundbreaking, historic, gorgeous, technologically astounding.  But are they really classics?  A ‘normal’ Sierra would be more likely classed as ‘old’ rather than ‘classic’, surely?  Then again, maybe it’s the Cosworth name that gives it a reputation that is more deserving of recognition.  The same could be said for various sports cars, each with a heritage and history to back up their place in history.  These are modern classics.  The Honda Civic, as good as it is, arguably isn’t a classic.  Yet.

The Americans

Also in attendance at the show were a good selection of American cars, including several Mustangs, a couple of Corvettes, some Cobras, a Hudson pickup in need of some TLC, and a totally tricked-out Dodge pickup that had hydraulic suspension so extreme that it could sit its bodywork flat on the ground.  There is no doubting the sheer power and presence of some of these cars, exuding an American atmosphere, but in some ways they do seem somewhat out of place here on our winding country roads and miniscule car parks.  I really felt sorry for the owner of one particular car, which was so unbelieveably long that it should really have needed a ‘long vehicle’ sticker on the back – imagine trying to drive that round town, let alone trying to find a parking space for it.  They are classic cars, no doubt, but they belong in their home country where there is actually room for them.

Best of show

The winner of the ‘Best of Show’ competition turned out to be a heavily modified Ford Mustang – not an old 70s ‘Bullitt’ model, but a car that couldn’t have been more than a decade old, and looked like it had been painted last week.  It was pimped to the max, with a massive ICE install, NOS, and doors that opened upwards instead of outwards.  Very nice, and I’m sure a lot of money and effort had gone into its preparation and modification.  On the other hand, I suspect there were many hard-core classic car owners who resented the fact that a modern car won overall instead of a car that actually had a few miles on the clock.

What makes a Mini?

This brings me neatly to a conversation I was having recently about what makes the Mini so special.  It is, after all, a car that wasn’t designed to be anything more than a little runabout, practical and efficient, and in that sense much the same as any other car in production.  The New Mini, developed by BMW, is a modern take on the classic, but hasn’t seen anywhere near the same level of enthusiasm as the original.  The failing of the New Mini is that its designers only took one aspect of the original’s brilliance and replicated that – there is no doubt that BMW know what they’re doing when it comes to performance and engineering precision.  They are German, after all.  But there are several critical components of the classic Mini that are absent, and those will always mark the Mini apart from the crowd.

When the Mini first hit the roads it was revolutionary.  It was the first car to have a transversely mounted engine, saving space and giving more room inside.  In fact the Mini was quite spacious relative to the other cars of the time, and still has more room in the back seats than a New Mini.  But I think what makes the Mini an enduring marvel is that it was never finished.  By that I mean the standard production car never crammed in everything you could possibly want, even at the end of its run in the late 90s.  Sure, there were many technical improvements over the years to both the engine and the interior, eventually adding such luxuries as a multi-point injection engine that didn’t suffer from the rain, a CD player built into a proper dashboard, air bags, nice interior trim.  But there were never any cup holders.  No Minis were ever fitted with air conditioning.  Or a clock.  And most didn’t even have a rev counter.  Any way you look at it, by the time you got hold of your Mini there were already a whole load of extras you really need to add to the car to make it more complete.  And that is the genius of the car’s continual success – owners can add what they like to make it more complete in their own eyes.

Compare that with the New Mini.  The New Mini has pretty much everything you need.  You’re not expected to need anything else.  It’s good as it is.  If it’s not good enough, but something else.  With a classic Mini, if it’s not quite what you want, you can modify it to suit your needs.  Add a CD player if you like.  Add a bodykit if you’re that way inclined.  Put another engine in if you really need more power.  Bolt chromed accessories on if you want to.

The mindset is also quite different to that of other car owners who modify their cars.  Most of the time if there is any modification going on it’s to add a massive stereo system or a monstrous bodykit.  It seems the only way to modify a modern car is to pimp it up, make it into a chavmobile and race people at the traffic lights.  Minis, on the other hand, can take a considerable amount of modifying without going anywhere near the boy-racer style.  And that, ultimately, is what attracts such a diverse group of people to the Mini – we can all appreciate it and make it our own, regardless of what we actually aspire to.