The Hot Rod Gazette Literary Review

In the big void in my life left by the absence of a new Terry Pratchett book, I read Fifty Shades of Grey. The trilogy of Grey books were far and away the best-selling books of 2012, outselling the next most popular author by five to one. And I expect at least 9.5 million of the 10+ million copies sold were sold to women. I read the first book over the course of a few weeks on my daily visit to the peace and solace of the dump station.I learned a few things. First is that each chapter is just slightly too long to avoid pins and needles whilst reading on the cacker. Second is that Fifty Shades of Grey is absolute, steaming tosh.

Now I appreciate that I ain't the book's target demographic, but given the old chestnut of 'If you locked 1000 monkeys in a room with 1000 typewriters for 1000 years, one of them would eventually produce the works of Shakespeare,' clearly one of the other monkeys with lower literary ambitions and a nasty case of the horn typed this bollocks and EL James is the clever bugger that got it published. Hopefully the monkey subsequently left the typing pool to pursue a career as a laboratory test subject, as it's just about the only animal in the world that deserves such a fate.

****Warning: following paragraph contains spoilers******

If you're planning on reading the book – and I highly recommend that you don't – the premise is thus. A young woman, who is nothing special, meets a man. He is breathtakingly good looking, cultured, straight, and with a dong like a cooking apple on a Pringles tube. Oh yeah, and he's a multi-millionaire. Having previously enjoyed a life of casual sex and S&M, this squillionaire falls for Miss Average after she changes him and proves him wrong, and he puts up with her shit with stoic good grace. Despite his capacious intellect, he seems to confuse her whiny neuroses with 'character' and feminine mystique. Then in the end, SHE leaves HIM.

On the back cover, in four-point text, is the word 'Fiction'. Jesus Christ, this should be printed in bright red block capitals on every page! It's a fairy story for bints, with less emphasis on ugly sisters and more emphasis on bondage and shagging. It's also been a brilliant marketing strategy for making a mucky book respectable, all the while making the Readers' Letters page of a Paul Raymond title seem not in the least bit far-fetched, and fuck my flat cap if it hasn't sold 10 million sodding copies. 

So while there are, presumably, 10 million women out there frothing at the bung-hole over this dream guy and the amount of nonsense he'll put up with, us blokes would never fall for that sort of cynical shite. Unless it's printed in a Haynes Manual. I can't get over the fact that Haynes have never been taken to court by Trading Standards just for the phrase “Reassembly is the reverse of the removal procedure.” Maybe it is, if you're working in a surgically clean, heated garage with all the tools and facilities you could ever want plus at least one assistant, and the car you're working on is six weeks old and has yet to see rain. For everyone else, the statement should be, “Reassembly is the reverse of the removal procedure, though you'll have to go out and buy new nuts and bolts to replace the ones that have stripped/snapped, you'll have to spend an hour looking for that spring or circlip that went pinging past your ear in step three, and as you've wrecked the gasket you'll have to make a laughable attempt to seal that joint using some four-year-old Hylomar that's gone off in the tube. The shops are now shut, and you've got to go to work in this car in the morning, so face it: you're knackered, mate.” Or, if you need a Haynes manual for a more modern car, why not save yourself £20 by writing "This is a complex procedure that should not be attempted by the home mechanic. Return the car to your franchised dealer" several times on a sheet of paper, photocopy it 200 times and have it bound in hardback. 

Old Haynes manuals were great, though, as they told you pretty much what you needed to know and how to go about doing it. I like manuals for cars where the entire wiring diagram fits on one page and you don't need to know every colour in the spectrum in German to understand it. The other day I had to look at the Haynes manual for the Bedford CF. Most of it was written in about 1968 when the CF was still new, and it didn't change too much until well into the Eighties. In the introduction, the author was bemoaning these new-fangled tightly-packaged modern vans, and the fact that there was far less working room around the engine than the reader may have become used to.

Jesus. What would the author have made of a 2012 turbo-diesel transverse front-wheel driver? Open the bonnet, lift the hatch from the floorpan, and you couldn't get much better access to the engine if it popped up on a spring like a jack-in-the-box. On a modern van you'd have to return it to the dealer to find out how to open the bonnet...

Then there's the timing belt. On a modern car, failure to attend to the expensive and labour-intensive timing belt at the specified intervals can basically lead to even more expensive and labour-intensive terminal engine damage, warranty voiditude and the subsequent ruin of western civilisation. What does the Haynes manual say about the timing belt on the old slant four? That it should never need adjustment or replacement. How far we've come...

Eugene