Beginnings

I haven’t always been without a car, wouldn’t want to create any meretricious greener than thou illusions… While never exactly a petrolhead, I’ve been as susceptible as anyone to the girlier attractions of the internal combustion engine and its various exoskeletons. I had four or five cars of my ‘own’, all of them red, including a BMW 3-series and an old-style Jeep Cherokee which I cherished for the same reasons as all small and nervous women cling to 4x4s, that it sat me high enough to give the illusion that I could see what I was doing, and made the drive up the icy hill to G’s school marginally less scary. The facts that it was corresponding more likely to roll over and to kill anything its impressive radiator grill came in contact with didn’t register with me any more than it does with my neighbours who still drive similar, albeit far more expensive, monsters now.