Sunday 12 April 2015

Well, Goodness Gracious Me!


You know those times when you feel a fart brewing up, and you think it's going to be a real crowd-pleaser? So, you shout, “Shut up, everyone, I've got a real prizewinner bubbling under, here!” and everyone shuts up and looks on in anticipation while you, at the centre of everyone’s attention, adopt the Bruce Forsyth elbow-on-knee-and-knuckles-on-forehead stance, and wait, and wait, and you're starting to go a bit red because of the strain. Then, eventually, it arrives at the bomb-bay and goes “pp”. And you go absolutely crimson out of sheer shame, and the fact that there's a worrying, slightly damp sensation spreading down under?

Then you'll know the opposite. Those times when it's quiet and still – for instance, in a waiting room, or on an aeroplane, or in the dock just before the judge releases the jury to consider their verdict against you – and you think you have a tiny fart that you can safely get shut of in silence. So, you surreptitiously lift one cheek a millimetre and... and it sounds like a ten-second blast on a foghorn half-full of porridge, rips your jeans, leaves scorch marks on the upholstery, causes the linoleum to curl up at the corners and creates a cloud of stench so thick you could knock a nail into it. As the cloud drifts across the room/court/plane, causing people to run, gag, retch and generally wish they'd lived a better life, you try to adopt that disgusted, “Jesus, who did THAT?” face while looking at the people around you, despite the fact that your chair is smouldering and there's a skidmark laminated to the wall behind you to a height of five feet which, if you look at it the right way, could depict the face of Satan.

Where's all this going? Well, the orange four-pot Mustang has sold, and it's gone off to its new home down in Essex with a gent who knows a thing or two about Fox Mustangs. For me, that car definitely fell into the first category – it was a GT, painted metalflake orange, with GT wheels, GT suspension and brakes, the GT body kit and '5.0' badges on the wings, but with a really limp 2.3-litre four-pot. It promised much, but delivered very little indeed. It shouted bang, but delivered whimper. It was a sheep in wolf's clothing, which I wouldn't have minded so much if it had provided 'sheep-level' fuel economy; it was definitely a wolf when it came to unleaded.

So now I have this little Nissan. It's a really basic 1987 Sunny LX 1.3-litre four-door saloon. And it falls into the second camp. Why? Because I expected absolutely nothing from it, so everything it does is a delightful surprise. It starts on the first touch of the key, and though it's far from fast it feels quite nippy and, somehow, faster than the Mustang. Though that's not difficult.

The previous owner was an elderly gentleman from Buxton, recently deceased, and it definitely has an “old geezer's car” vibe about it. For a start, there's the tartan rug on the back seat. Then there's the charmingly politically-incorrect little caricature dolls on the parcel shelf of our colonial cousins. I've left them there for the time being.

Then there are the floor mats. What is it with old people and soft furnishings in their cars? There were no fewer than four bits of additional carpet in the passenger footwell, on top of the OE rubber floor mat, along with a tin of pound-shop “Back To Black” under the seat.

Emptying the glove box was a lesson in itself. If seems that the executor of the previous owner's estate couldn't be arsed to empty the car before punting it on, so the glove box contained everything you see on the seat in the photo. There were a dozen or so cassettes, mostly Elvis and Roy Orbison, though centre stage went to “Al Jolson's Greatest Hits”. There was a pair of sunglasses with one lens missing, a scalpel(?) and a load of boiled sweets that had melted and stuck everything together. No, they weren't Werther's Originals, but they were still the sort of sweets that seem to only be bought by pensioners.

Another lesson was the cassette player. Somebody had gently removed the original radio-cassette – possibly with a pick-axe, judging from the state of the dash – and replaced it with a really fancy Sony tape deck. That same person, presumably, wired it in with the same degree of panache – chocolate-block connectors everywhere, everything connected to a switched live, the bare constant-live wire was just floating about, there was no earth so it was presumably only earthed through the aerial, one of the speaker negative wires was connected to another switched live and only one of the two speakers worked. I stuck a CD player in, though the door speakers are beyond shite.

Of course, despite its 64,000 miles, it's far from perfect. There's a clunk coming from the driver's side front suspension which I couldn't trace but suspect a drop link, the driver's window doesn't wind up or down quite straight so it's a two-handed job, and the door locks are so worn you could open them with a teaspoon. But, overall, I'm delighted to say that my new old car is a massive, wet fart.

Eugene