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Mercedes

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The very lovely Lexus GX470 (which goes by the name of Lorelai) first made its appearance in these posts back in July 2015, when The Girl and I purchased her from a kind soul who lived not far from us here on the Saanich peninsula. She has appeared many times since then in postings, often in the background of photos and usually tirelessly performing one of the many tasks for which she was purchased. I love her to bits and she has been an inspired choice for this part of the world.

When we acquired her she had a little less than 168,000 miles on the clock (miles rather than kilometers because she had originally been registered in Portland, Oregon). Now – that is a reasonably high mileage for many vehicles on the road today – but for the Lexus  (which is basically a Toyota 4Runner with a fancier skin) it counts as next to nothing. If looked after 300,000+ miles should be quite do-able. As she dates from 2003 this means that for the first twelve years of her life she averaged some 14,000 miles a year.

The reason for my posting this now – of course – is that we have just passed a major milestone. We were down in town the other day and when we arrived home the odometer revealed that we had just passed the 200,000 mile mark. The mathematicians amongst you will already have done the calculations: since she came to stay with us the Lexus has done another 32,000 miles in about five years and four months – at an average of just over 6,000 miles a year.

Well – I am supposed to be retired!

Back in the day when I used to commute into London every day in my little city car (Pearl, my much loved Mercedes SL300, only came out of the garage on sunny days) I would regularly clock up around 14,000 miles a year myself and I am absolutely delighted not to have to do that any more.

Now – at the current rate it will take more than another eight years for the Lexus to reach 250,000 miles, by which time she would be twenty five years old and I would be in my middle 70s.

As for 300,000…? Not sure either of us will last that long!

 

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Photo by Andy Dawson ReidBitter:

Some things are just very sad…

I have mentioned in these dispatches on numerous occasions this particular of the lovely ‘ladies’ by which my life has been blessed. I refer, of course, to Pearl – my beloved Mercedes 300SL – which may be observed here posing decorously on the Cote D’Azur a couple of years back.

No point in beating about the bush. This is a sad occasion. She and I have finally had to go our separate ways.

I have owned the car for more than a decade. In that time we have traveled extensively together. We have toured on the continent. We have driven through the street of Paris and London on summer nights with the top down. We have posed together outside stately homes. She bore the Kickass Canada Girl and I up to the English Lake District on our first major adventure together. She has been an utterly constant and reliable companion.

I always knew that we could not take the SL to Canada, and that she would have to be sold. It was just a question of timing. In the end – because we don’t know how the early part of next year will pan out – I decided that I should try to sell her this autumn. An advert was placed – there was much interest and she went very quickly. I can’t say I am surprised…

Just sad…

Pearl has gone to a firm that restores and deals in classic cars. She will there receive much needed care and attention before finding her way to a new and grateful owner.

Sweet:

The only possible way to consider this turn of events without getting depressed about it is to tell myself that such things represent forward movement towards our ultimate goal – our dream of retiring to BC. The monies realized will be put towards those ‘toys’ without which it seems not possible to truly enjoy the Canadian outdoor experience – the 4×4 – the trailer – the boat…

When other items on the programme are dragging their heels and taking their sweet time it is good to get a sense of things actually being accomplished – of progress being made – and we are grateful for that.

I am also very glad that the Merc will go to a good home.

You might – of course – be feeling slightly nauseous by this point – wondering how such a fuss can be made about an expensive and out-dated mode of transport. Well – if you get it – good for you – and if you don’t – then I guess you don’t… Personally I would much rather experience such enthusiasms and emotions (even should the object of them be inanimate) than not do so.

But that’s just me…

 

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Stereotyping gets a bad press! In fact, modern usage of the term seems almost entirely pejorative, with the emphasis on the possibility/probability of negative consequences. This is a considerable distortion of the term’s original connotation as a ‘sense-making’ tool – one which is supposedly judgementally neutral. I must admit to having played my own minuscule part in the assault on this particular gambit by inveighing vigorously and vociferously again same whilst studying psychology in my first year at college back in the early 70s. Needless to say I failed the unit!

Where is this going, you ask? Well – naturally to a cringe-making admission that I now recognise in myself an unfortunate tendency to conform to at least one formerly unacceptable stereotype… that of the grumpy old man!

Can it really be that things are considerably more ‘pants’ (technical term!) than they were 40 years ago, or is it just that the young of all generations are simply immune to the inanities and ludicrosities of life? They presumably have far more important things to worry about than modern systems that don’t work properly, or facilities that appear to have been designed by the inhabitants of an entirely different universe to the one that the rest of us inhabit. Maybe all that us old folks have left in life is the desire and capacity to have a jolly good whinge about things…

Do feel free to disagree at any point!

‘Oh dear’, you say to yourself, ‘this is building up to an anecdote’. Too right!

I posted a few weeks ago on the subject of the nerve-tickling experience of Pearl’s MOT test. Since then I have had to pay her annual road tax – very probably for the last time (sniff!) – and just this last week her insurance fell due. Now – I have owned Pearl for 9 years and have insured her through the same online broker throughout that period. When I first applied for insurance in 2003 I was told that – because she is a soft-top – I would need to fit an immobiliser. This I duly did and everything then went ahead without further hitch.

This time – on receipt of the renewal reminder, a weighty document of a dozen or so pages – I called the broker and asked to renew. We went through the lengthy process on the phone and all seemed to have been settled. A short while later I was emailed the new policy documents – another hefty tome which I, being a Luddite, naturally printed out for posterity.

There was a pause.

Then – after about half an hour – the phone rang. It was my broker. He informed me that the insurers – having already issued the documents – had now discovered that they could find no written record of my ever having installed the immobiliser – nine years previously! Somehow I had had getting on for a decade of perfectly successful insurance – including one small no-fault claim – but was now being told that I couldn’t get cover because they did not have the essential document. Doh! The broker inquired sweetly as to whether I might still have the original receipts and documentation. Honestly!!

Sad thing is – of course – that I had…

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Oh it’s such a perfect day,
I’m glad I spent it with you.
Oh such a perfect day,
You just keep me hanging on,
You just keep me hanging on.

Perfect Day – Lou Reed

Well – a perfect weekend really… with one glaring and – hopefully – blindingly obvious exception.

Following last week’s unbridled incalescence the temperature dropped a couple of degrees, the heat haze dissipated to leave the sky a cloudless cerulian and a playful breeze tempered even the most febrile of brows.

Friday evening found me in the company of a group of School staff at a buffet reception in the High Master’s garden; a most agreeable way to unwind after the week and a good way to prepare for the weekend ahead. The final weeks of the summer term can sometimes almost overwhelm with their abundance of social events – a last frantic ‘hurrah’ for the leavers and a long slow exhalation for those others for whom – unlike me, sadly – the long school summer holiday hovers tantalisingly on the horizon.

On Saturday I packed a variety of bags and set off in the 300SL for Sevenoaks in Kent. A beautiful leisurely drive – wind very much in hair – through the Surrey hills delivered me to our good friends – who live at another school not dissimilar to this one – in plenty of time for an aperitif before dressing for the main event – a splendid black-tie ball organised by the parents’ association. Though I am not, myself, much of a dancer I am always happy to don the tartan for such an occasion, and the combination of good food, good wine, good friends and good conversation meant that when the 1:00am deadline for carriages rolled around no time at all seemed to have elapsed.

Waking only a little the worse for wear to find an equally lovely day already well under way I bade my grateful farewells and retraced my top-down tracks as far as Guildford, where I was to play my first proper game of cricket of the summer. The ground was up on the downs (I realise that may sound counter-intuitive to Canadians and other non-Brits!) above the town and offered splendid views over the Surrey countryside towards London. The match was played in a suitably amiable spirit, I scored a few runs and the right side won. It was, all in all, a most satisfactory result and I rolled home close to 9pm tired but happy.

One thought, however, nagged at me throughout… one cause for a scintilla of sadness, regardless of the loveliness of the days, of the caliber of the entertainments or of the pleasures of the bucolic countryside. To whit  – what could possibly be the purpose and meaning of such joy if not shared with one’s consort? I have been fortunate enough to have experienced many wonderful things and exceptional times – both in the UK and in BC – but without the Kickass Canada Girl at my side nothing is as ambrosial, as piquant… as exquisite… as it is when she is!

 

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There is a certain nervous tension in the air ‘chez nous’ this weekend. Both Pearl and I are in need of examinations.

For new readers I should explain at this point that Pearl is my rather lovely Mercedes 300SL, about which you can read more here. It is widely held that – for chaps of a certain age – owning a convertible is a sure sign of mid-life crisis. If that is the case then mine must be one of the longest on record, given that I have not only owned Pearl for more than 10 years, but she also is my third rag-top. Perhaps my life is a perpetual crisis… On the other hand, if this is indeed mid life, then I should be in for a good long innings!

I digress…

I am in need of a medical examination as part of the application process for my Canadian permanent residency. More on this – quite probably much more – in my on-going series of posts explaining the whole process in gruesome detail. Let us – for now – focus instead on Pearl.

It is that time of year at which Pearl’s MOT test falls due. I feel sure that vehicles in Canada are subject to a similar testing regimen – indeed I have no doubt that such is the case the world over. In the UK the test was instigated in 1960 by the Ministry of Transport – hence the origin of the name. We no longer have a Ministry of Transport, but the name survives in acronym form as the title of this annual inspection.

When first established the test was applied to vehicles aged ten years and above. By 1967 it had been modified into roughly its current form, applying to all vehicles that have achieved their third anniversary. This reminds me of the witty comment made by Michael Flanders – the vocal half of Flanders and Swann – during their 60s musical comedy review, ‘At the Drop of a Hat’.

“Hello again. We had to look outside during the interval, see if our car’s all right. It’s getting a bit old, it’ll have to be tested soon. You know they started these tests for 10-year-old cars, they brought it down to six, now five, they’ll bring it down to three. There’s even been some talk of having them tested before they leave the factories.”

I grew up on Flanders and Swann, largely as a result of my mother’s affection for them and for their satirical songs. They were an unlikely duo who had been at Westminster School together before the war, but who hadn’t really started working together until they met again once the war was over. In the meantime Michael Flanders – who once had ambitions of becoming an actor – had contracted polio and was confined to a wheelchair. Donald Swann wrote the music and played the piano, and when they discovered that Flanders’ humorous introductions went down as well as the songs they adopted the review format that was to make them famous.

Their humour was gentle, witty and intelligent – all the things I like in comedy. I was immediately impressed by a duo who could base a song on the first and second law of thermodynamics – who wouldn’t be – but the clincher for me was an elegiac lament called ‘The Slow Train’, which – by incorporating the idiosyncratic names of many of the bucolic English villages and hamlets that had their railways stations sundered from them in the early 60s as part of the wide-ranging cutbacks imposed by the pillaging Dr. Beeching (the first Chairman of the British Railways Board) – contrived to say something heartfelt about the loss of a minor but important part of our heritage.

“The Sleepers sleep at Audlem and Ambergate.
No passenger waits on Chittening platform or Cheslyn Hay.
No one departs, no one arrives
From Selby to Goole, from St Erth to St Ives.
They’ve all passed out of our lives
On the Slow Train, on the Slow Train.”

 

I digress – again!

Pearl is now some 26 years old and getting through the MOT test is no longer the formality that it once was. To be fair, she does live in a dry garage – under a cover – for much of the year, and does a relatively low mileage mostly in dry, sunny conditions – but I reckon she has earned that. Anyway – when it came to it she sailed through with flying colours.

Let’s just hope my medical goes as well.

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Oh Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?
My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends.
Worked hard all my lifetime, no help from my friends,
So Lord, won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz?

Gerald Levert/Andy Gibson – sung by Janis Joplin

It is surprisingly difficult to find statistics on worldwide open-top ownership, so my gut feeling that the English must come somewhere near the top of the league when it comes to this peculiar obsession must remain purely subjective. At this time of year the merest hint of the sun peeping through the murk is enough to bring to the roads an epidemic of rag-topped roadsters that have presumably spent the winter months hibernating in warm, dry garages.

Why it should be that the English are thus so afflicted I am not sure – particularly given our infelicitous climate. Perhaps it has to do with wishful thinking, or the lack of a pertinent contemporary mythology – or perhaps our midlife crises are just more acute than for other races. Either way, those from sunnier climes who might be expected to embrace the joys of wind-in-the-hair motoring instead tend to eschew these delights in favour of air-conditioned homogeneity.

I am, myself, a long standing convertible convert. The above is my pride and joy – the other lady in my life – and she is called Pearl. You probably don’t really need me to elucidate the origin of the name, but (for younger readers)… ‘Pearl’ was both the title of the album that Janis was recording at the point of her untimely death, and indeed her nickname for herself.  For those that care about such things my Pearl is a 1986 300SL. I have owned her for around ten years now and she has given me a great deal of pleasure over that time.

Regrettably, any thoughts of bringing her to Canada in a couple of years time really are a non-starter. If I wished I could pick up a North American version of the SL for somewhat less than it would cost to ship her over and do the necessary work to register her.

Which leads me to this observation… My perception, rightly or wrongly, is that – for a state that has a mild climate and considerably more days of sunshine than we do in the UK – British Columbians do not seem particularly keen on open top motoring. Yes, there are enthusiasts, but nowhere near the numbers that we see in England. Pickups are all well and good, but – for me – just do not hold the same appeal.

So – what should I drive when I finally make it to Victoria? My instinct is that I should run a 4×4, and I will certainly need it to be equipped to tow a boat. I am no stranger to the breed having previously owned an old Landrover 110 Station Wagon, which I really enjoyed both on and off-road. Unfortunately the fact that it boasted a 3.5l V8, weighed over 2 tons and had the aerodynamics of a block of flats (Canadian: Condo!) meant that it averaged only around 12mpg! In the end I could no longer afford to run the beast – even had my conscience allowed me to do so.

Trouble is, I still hanker after a rag-top – and whereas there used to be quite a range of 4×4 convertible options, as far as I can see there is now only the one…

Hmmm! What to do?

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