THE GLORIOUS FANTASY OF MOTOR CARS

Farewell, old friend, you are heading for the scrapyard in the sky. The tank is dry and the End is Nigh. Say goodbye to burn-ups, the romance of the open road, the highway stretching before us like a tarmac rainbow as we gun the engines one last time, bound for glory in our four-wheel time machines. It was always too good to last.

THE END OF THE ROAD

I don't anticipate driving at all by 2025. Apart from the fact that I now live on a small island with an excellent bus service, the unstoppable spiral of petrol prices isn't a staircase I can keep climbing. In any case, it's hardly a surprise, as driving cars-for the majority- was clearly a doomed pursuit by the turn of this rather incident-packed century. Anyone who'd ever spent a morning or afternoon drumming their heels on the existential hamster-wheel of the M25 knew this twenty-odd years ago.  And I was that hamster.

With both the climate and covid catastrophes now on pause, it was only logical for the globalists to employ a war to skyrocket gas prices. One way or another, they have to shove the little people out of the skies and off the roads. History will view the PC era (post covid)  simply as a hi-tech replay of what happened when horses were the time-and-motions edge the rich held over the poor. 

Back in the late 20th century, however, if you didn't drive, you were a freak. I know, because until the mid-90's, I was that freak. My conversion from freak to hamster was unavoidable. With its unlimited menu of sinful pleasures, London was ever-ready to corrupt anyone with energy or money to burn. As I regularly found myself with small amounts of one or the other, it was only a matter of time until the rubber met the road. In my late thirties, I took the wheel and found that driving cars was, perhaps, the most potent sample of privilege I had ever consumed. Driving was cool: life was easier, things happened faster, my social life expanded and new work opportunities opened up. 

WHEELS ON FIRE

At that time I was a junk-dealer in London. In a matter of just a few weeks driving, I learned the first -and most important- rule of capitalism. Stuff can be sold for any price at all, depending on WHERE you put it. I could multiply the price of an ordinary gate-leg table by ten just by moving it from a car-boot sale in Gillingham to a market-stall in Camden. By the time it reached a first-floor flat in Kensington, the price was think of a number. A battered old VW Golf was more than enough horsepower to turn junk into profit. 

This wasn't a small revelation. All of the mysteries of the supply chain, all the complexities of the free-market economy, spring from the art of relocation. You move enough stuff and you make money. At one end of this paradigm is a grubby junk-dealer with an old banger full of bric-a-brac; at the other is a global empire  of Amazon warehouses with armies of workers and robots and fleets of vans that roll around the clock. 

ESCAPE

The chance to earn a good living was merely the first privilege I acquired on four wheels. Suddenly I was free to roam and made, more or less at will, road-trips to Wales, Scotland and France in the lime-green chariot. I fed and frolicked in every village, town and city that took my fancy. The car was the personification of escape. If you didn't like the scene, you could just drive away.

Exciting as this was, I soon became aware that with each passing year the same journeys took longer, with rather a lot of time spent sitting immobilised by traffic queues, jams and 'incidents' . The population was exploding -particularly in London- and the roads were filling up. On my regular trips to the south coast it became gradually more difficult to tell where London stopped and Brighton began. Even crossing the Thames from Greenwich to Kensington and back was becoming an expedition and my motoring, now a necessity, was no longer actually fun.

I left London in 2000, moving to the countryside of Kent. Co-opted into journalism, I began driving eight hundred miles a month collecting stories and reports for various papers and magazines. Driving was still the hub of my existence and my income, but I was free(ish) to wander the counties and shires, mainly ignoring the motorways and spent increasingly long periods enjoying the traveller's whimsical life. 

I was thrilled to explore the deeper countryside, climbing hills and following interesting signs at random, patrolling the banks of obscure rivers and 'discovering' quirky country pubs where I could 'write' in peace and quiet. The amazing luxury of setting my own schedules made driving a joy again, and I once even managed to get paid for writing about just driving around the south coast in a sports car with my dog for company. If that ain't privilege, what is?

Like a mistress the car lured me away from the rat-run cities into the West Midlands and eventually South Wales, where the main roads -built with vast EU subsidies-  were both superb and empty. A twenty-minute drive to the supermarket often featured the kind of vistas in those TV car adverts where upwardly-mobile city boys and bitches zoom through a glorious vacant wilderness in gleaming vehicles. (I often  wondered what that kind of person would do, when they pulled over and found themselves in the echoing, hollow streets of Llandrindod Wells or Myrthyr Tydfil).  

CLICK VIDEO TO PLAY

Hooked on wanderlust and my circuit of riverbank liquid-lunches, in 2012 I ditched the tiny basement flat where I was based and spent most of the next year living in a van, supplying on-site animal-care to wealthy landowners with travel on their minds. I wasn't aware that 'van-life' was actually a lifestyle trend at the time -and one that would gather force. For me it was just a convenient form of freedom -from bills, council tax, junk-mail, and the one thousand other things government cannot resist hassling us about. The clients were scattered far and wide and if there were a few days between gigs I'd point the van at the nearest piece of coastline, park by the sea, picnic on beaches and fall asleep to the sound of surf. 

Age takes its toll, however, and by 2017 the van had become an unaffordable indulgence, and a full-size warm bed for the night had become at least a seasonal necessity. By the time Deadly Covid rolled out we had forsaken the open road and secured an address and a Skoda to protect ourselves from the slings and arrows. 

CRAZY HORSES

Two years of outrageous fortune later, the thought of retiring the car seems no more daunting than the prospect of retiring myself: it's going to happen, it can't be stopped. In  a world where the government takes your savings, then your job, and then forbids you to leave home, it's only a matter of time till they steal the wheels. I blame the Osmonds, personally. If it hadn't been for the runaway success of their 1972 eco-warrior hit-single Crazy Horses, the elite might never have considered saving the planet from our gas-guzzling steel ponies. (CLICK HERE to savour that mind-boggling landmark in pop history).

So the seeds of the Green Borg were planted long before Covid, back when the Great Reset was just a gleam in the eye of young Klaus Schwab. I don't suppose I ever took the eco-loons seriously though, until the Extinction Rebellion kooks got their first leg-up from central government. Behind the scenes, however, the technology was creeping into view. Arriving at a client's (collosal) country house in early 2019, I got my first glimpse of how the future would look for the havealots. The latest must-have gizmo was mounted by the front door and a pair of shiny new electric 4x4s were basking nearby.I snapped the photo below out of sheer curiosity.

I didn't immediately know what it was, to be honest, but soon afterwards they were appearing in service stations. A fortnight ago I noticed one in the Lidl car-park in Glasgow, and that looks pretty damn ominous. 

For the next generation of poor sods condemned to spend their adult lives marooned on the United Refugee Kingdom, the foot-down four-wheel rodeo will be less than a mirage.  Freedom, whatever form it takes, will not involve hurtling down the open road. 

I pity those people. They will experience life the way downtrodden peasants did in the middle ages. Trapped in tiny hovels, they will be force-fed 'virtual experience' while the havealots roar past in the distance on wide, smart motorways where potholes and slowcoaches no longer exist and every car is a limousine. Alone with their micro-budgets, the little people will get to watch coloured headlights glittering in the distance, like the fireworks at the birthday party of someone special.

UP THE LADDER

Memory plays tricks, of course, but I think I was, briefly, one of the last lucky ones. Frankly, the modern driving experience has become an awful grind. The traffic lights in Glasgow are so agonisingly slow to change you can grow a full beard trying to make a left turn on Sauchiehall Street.  The motorways lecture me every five miles, half the drivers are suicidal hysterics and to be honest I've been to most places too often. I can't say I'm impressed by modern vehicles either. Over the years, various clients handed me the keys to their fabulous cars -a cluch of Land-Rovers and gigantic white Hi-Lux spring to mind- but I was never comfortable in them. 

One particularly rich (and rather insufferable) woman insisted that I savour the luxuries of her brand-new top-range, super-powerful, all-singing all-dancing something or other, so I drove it for a fortnight. That monster nearly drove me insane. It was like crawling into a pinball machine; a bristling nightmare of buttons, pads and lights, mechanised voices and flashing signals, three-D maps that materialised on screens that unfurled from secret compartments and a deafening radio that defied my attempts to silence it. The shortest journeys became horribly dangerous adventures, as I was too busy flapping and prodding the five-hundred interior switches to notice much of anything in front of the windscreen. You could go from 10 to about 120mph by moving your foot one millimetre, and there was a peculiar glitch in the onboard computer which turned the engine off without warning if you got stuck in traffic for more than thirty seconds. If I drove to the pub and back I'd return trembling, nerves stretched like piano wire, hoarse from shrieking at the fickle, kalaedescopic dashboard display. I got the distinct feeling the car didn't need or want me on board.

DIY DRIVING

I would rather remember the humble buzziness of the little red MG midget which died in Kent when a hurricane wind blew me through a hedge into a field, bursting all four tyres, sending the engine through the bonnet and me not quite through the windscreen. Or the last hurrah of the green VW Golf on its final run down the M1, when a black smoke-cloud belched into our faces from the disintegrating gear-stick and my brother, in the passenger seat, inquired politely is it supposed to do that? Equally, I will forever cherish the memory of stopping by the A20 roadside and bridging the snapped exhaust on my Transporter van with an empty hairspray can -a repair that kept us rolling for sixteen weeks.

I will never plug an electric car into a wall and charge up for a trip; it's just not me. I liked the smells of oil and petrol, and the old engines you could fiddle with and tweak and sometimes even fix, back before they hid all the important bits behind plastic screens and got the goddam computer involved. And above all I loved to drive to new places and get stuff and move it from A to B, and give people a lift, and when I got pissed off with life I would jump in the car and escape. I guess in the future, I'll just get on the bus and spend the day on the other side of the island.

Ian Andrew-Patrick

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