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Over the years I’ve developed an interest, some may say obsession in cars and all things motorised. Here’s a thread of topics that lays out some of the things that have nurtured and inspired that interest.
There’s no particular order to them and no single reason why something is here, neither are any things less important than others…
A good one to kick off has to be film star cars from the humble VW Beetle ‘Herbie’ to the menacing black Dodge Charger in Bullitt. I first remember as a kid seeing Herbie in one of the “Herbie goes to…” films, probably Monte Carlo and was enthralled that cars could really do in real life (I was probably about eight) what I knew they could all along! And so the list grows for both the big film screen and the smaller television world, it must be endless. General Lee, another Dodge Charger, McQueen’s own 390GT Mustang, James Bond Aston Martins, a red Dino and an orange AMV8 in the Persuaders, the Green Hornet, Batman (old and new), the Monkees, UFO, U.N.C.L.E and of course Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. Then there was the unbreakable Dodge Monaco in the Blues Brothers, A Plymouth Fury called Christine, a black Trans Am and a dodgy cowboy in Smokey and the Bandit, a red, white and blue Mini in Turin and the all too ordinary Dodge Challenger in something very wierd called Vanishing Point. More telly cars became as famous as their actor drivers; a red and white striped Gran Torino outdid a questionable cardigan, Rockford lived in a trailer and drove a gold Firebird, Magnum drove a borrowed 308 GTS and every week I’d watch just to see the cars. Perhaps that’s where it all started?
These are of course just some of my favourites but the list is almost endless. As a closer for the next ‘about motors’, anyone know who said this;
“I bet one of those would go like the bloody clappers with a twin cam in it”
and just what it was about to start off?
Probably time to report on the proceedings of the Australian paper-mountain. We were very much stuck in first gear for a good while and although there hasn’t been much change at least the motor taking us to Sydney hasn’t blown up completely.
There are still dribbling emails from the migration agency handling the business visa application, still more requests for copies of forms, signatures to agree to this and certifications agreeing to that. I have no doubt it will continue for weeks to come. However we have managed to reduce the revs on the screaming engine of transition and at least make some progress towards myself getting out to Sydney. In some ways this is a good thing, although due to said visa restrictions I may not be able to start work until the business papers are agreed, so at least I can begin the search for somewhere to live.
As to the situation remaining in the good old Confederation Helvetica, that’s now more complex than ever. We have to give three months notice on our rented house, which would be fine if we weren’t approaching the end of the year as we cannot contractually leave on the 31 December. So that takes us into January for our departure lock stock and barrel. It’s something to do with landlords not having empty properties around the New Year time. Clauses, clauses always in favour of the landlord, so it seems. The quotations we’ve had for moving our possessions are astronomical and as we are not being funded by some multi-million dollar conglomerate it’s coming out of our own ever-depleting funds. Already we have reached the sad decision of having to re-home the cat. Poor Lila has survived an horrific road accident in France, been stuffed in a box and driven to Switzerland, is tormented by the kids and adored by the girls. And now she has to face life on a Swiss farm. The fee to get her across is equivalent to three airfares (!) but it’s more the stress of such a journey and the prospect of 90 days locked up in quarantine, with the uncertain outcome of actually surviving it all. Of course there’s two sides to that situation too, I couldn’t live with the harrowing guilt of having sentenced a poor animal to such demise AS WELL as having paid thousands for the privilege! Personally I think she’ll fair better by staying on the farm than taking her chances down under.
The boxes and boxes of our personal possessions that we gleefully unpacked back in November 2005 after our struggles in France will now all have to be re-packed and doing it ourselves may just cut the costs by enough to warrant all the hassle. Oh what joy! Shipping freight this way is all done on volume so if we wish to cut down the total it’s necessary to offload the big box-like pieces of furniture that are basically full of fresh air. And we’ve only just got them! Fine if we want to ship dozens of small boxes of heavy spanners and tools but not for chests of drawers. Either way it’s a headache of gigantic proportions. We could share a container, we could have a crate made to size, we could airfreight our valuables or we could just sell the lot, if it were not for the paintings, the books, the toys, the memories. Some people have gasped out loud that we’re thinking of moving to Australia, I’m beginning to see why.
But I’m not really worried about all the possessions and as for the money, that’s all replaceable too. I’ve resolved myself to arriving in Australia with the clothes on our backs, the suitcases we’ll be carrying and the rest of our worldly belongings in a twenty foot container on a ship somewhere bobbing about the ocean, a few thousand nautical miles behind the 747.
My impending flight is what is really harrowing for it means I have to leave behind my fledglings and with all the complications mentioned above it’s very unclear when they will be able to join me again. Still, there is the respite from all the panicking to look forward to, the challenge of finding our new home and the prospect of some sunshine. It may also help my spiralling mind out of the confusion and utter state of overload that it’s currently in.
All this is really just detail compared to the actual job of pulling off the move itself. So, second gear is where we are and the motor’s just warming up as is the weather…
10th September 2006 and the Formula One Italian Grand Prix was held at Monza. It was won, fittingly by Michael Schumacher in the Scuderia Ferrari 248F1. Just minutes after the V8 stopped breathing the world was told what the world needed to hear.
Michael Schumacher, a name that for so long, has so consistently been at or very near the top told the waiting media about his retirement from racing. On a day like this it is inevitable that I would have to write something about the imminent departure of a motor sporting icon.
His last Monza. He will retire from racing at the end of 2006. The future holds only uncertainties and for that he cannot be sure of having enough in reserve to meet his own towering standards. Personally, I think this is a good thing, if not a great thing. He knows it’s time to go and he told us all so. Better to go out at the top than just hang on with your best days past you. I can’t write anywhere near enough words here to describe or pay homage to the achievements this man has recorded. Many, many others will do that for me and I’ll be able to buy the books, the films and so on.
There are thousands of young people who have grown up watching F1 knowing only that MS drives a red Ferrari, indeed my own children think any racing car that is missile-like in looks with sticky-out wheels is a “schumacher”, although they are only young and Dad will see to it that they are not misguided! My eldest teenage daughter cannot grasp the idea that a man can drive in over two hundred and thirty F1 races and win every third one. And there we go already on the statistics.
MS is not about numbers though. He is about winning and if ever the adage about second place being the first loser was applied then this man has to be the epitome of that phrase. I know he’s done this and that, I know he’s played dirty, I know he’s been controversial and I know he has always been the most passionate, committed-to-winning racing driver the World has ever known. Bar none. I know these things because for sixteen years I have followed almost every single race he’s raced. I’ve watched him at Hockenheim, I’ve read as many printed words about him as almost all my other racing heroes totalled together, both in English and his native German. That said, he is not my ultimate motor racing driver, that’s for another piece but he is such an enigma, which is why so much is being said about him.
He has also won more Formula One races than any other driver, ever. And surely you don’t turn up in your fireproof Nomex suit on a Sunday afternoon having come through the savage younger ranks of FFord, FRenault, F3, GP2 to see if you can win a Formula One race? You turn up to win. I am convinced that if more of today’s drivers arrived with that attitude we would see racing the likes of which we can only imagine.
Fans, critics and followers are talking of favourite moments. For me the OMP-gloved hand slipping out of the cockpit as the chequered flag dropped some ninety times already. That all-knowing feeling that he’s just beaten the rest – again.
Others, so rapt in their admiration for MS talk of him in a religious light but surely a false god if ever there was one?
Of course he is, we jokingly among our peers talk about MS being König Schumacher, or Schumi the King, at one point I had even wanted to put a picture up with the words,
“…and God came down to earth and drove a Ferrari”
… and probably still will but only in order to wind up visitors to the house. To thousands of people he is seen in the same light as a major pivotal religious influence but a god he cannot be. As a mere mortal man he may have achieved so much, the record books have been re-written for him but he is no god. Just a man, started out as a normal kid with a dollop of talent in a knocked together kart from dad and the rest as they say is now very much history. And he will go in the same way as he has passed through. So that’s why he can only be a demi-god at most.
The world is alight with red-hot press about Schumacher and will be for some time, Michael Schumacher happened and he turned Formula One upside down, inside out and back to front. Any establishment is bound to reel from that and F1 will be reeling for quite some time.
Perhaps the reason so many people in F1 have so much to say against Michael Schumacher is that they simply cannot let themselves as drivers ex or current, champions gone by, managers, rule-makers and fellow competitors believe that a human being can accomplish so much in the SAME GAME as themselves? Ten years of that game has been played with the same team, which is something else I think galls nearly everyone who doesn’t wear a Marlboro shirt with a small black horse rearing on a yellow shield. Ten years is a very long time in any job but in F1 where it’s all so volatile, so money and media focussed ten years is a lifetime. Two times World Champion Mika Hakkinen, the flying Finn himself admitted that sticking with one team is the only way to the top. There’s too much technology advancement, sponsor influence and risk of change to face by changing teams all the time. Witness Frank Williams Grand Prix Engineering. MS was either clever enough to see this, which I truly believe he and his advisors were clever enough to see, or he simply wanted to be a Ferrari driver no matter how (what red-blooded male doesn’t?), which is probably true as well. Kimi Raikkonen has just realised a boyhood dream and the world waits with baited breath for him to appear clad in the red suit of F1 warrior. The renaissance for Ferrari could not have happened at a better time either and they for one will be eternally grateful to MS.
Call it jealousy if you like, call it what you will. What is clear is that once the 2006 season has been decided, and really I think for many people it matters not if it ends in an unprecedented eighth title for MS, then the world of F1 can move on. The rule-makers are probably glad too, for never before has such a formidable combination of talent, intelligence, skill and sheer adversity been put together in one team representing such a force to be reckoned with and for it to happen at Ferrari was almost too much for the poor FIA. Certainly it’s been too much for some of their rivals? How Il Commendatore’s eyes would be twinkling behind those dark glasses. The rule-makers truly have had their work cut out keeping in front of the likes of Brawn, Todt and Schumacher because if the rules lean in one particular way then the clever ones will exploit them to the full. That is one of the markers that defines a top team.
What really has to happen now, in order to get back on a level keel, is for MS to go down in history and the whole business of rules and regulations be set for the new scene. The talent coming through that can bring us all a new Formula One. The losers here aren’t really losing much at all. I am far happier that he will not be racing in 2007, because the sport millions dearly love to watch can breathe new life again, if you like it is only going to lose this excess baggage.
2007 then can be the year that instead of the whole F1 grid, every team and the entire world media barrage ‘racing’ against Michael Schumacher, will be the beginning of an era where at last the field can be levelled by removing the largest obstacle that everyone has wanted to surmount these last sixteen years and everyone from the fans to the rule makers can breath a huge sigh of relief so letting the drivers finally race against each other again. Look at most of the tributes from the ‘best of the rest’ of current drivers and it’s easy to read this message into most of what they say. What is a real shame, and true reflection of the whole F1 spectacle is that none of them have the sportsmanship to come right out and say “thank god he’s going, we can all race against each other now…”
There will be people disappointed and even sad that MS is going but there are no real losers because of the legacy that is Michael Schumacher. The redefined standards; the new way of tackling winning and becoming champion, the way of building success, picking out the best of everything available, the commitment to winning and ultimately working in a team, not for a team. Maybe the days of me, me, me, that we saw with our other ‘most-loved to be hated’ drivers will return but then we’ll have new villains to turn on. Maybe we’ll see more current drivers learning from the MS legacy. Maybe the drivers will all slip back into the fags and pints of beer after a race, partying til 4am, raising hell and dare I say it showing openly something we now miss called friendship amongst each other?
Probably not – that really is lost.
Whatever happens, F1 has changed forever and like it or not that’s down to one driver, one man, one name.
Michael Schumacher.
There has been a change to the circumstances chez Von Trapps which will bring about major logistical upheaval. We are off to Australia in the near future, near meaning anything from a few weeks to a couple of months. It’s finally time to make one more big move to a land where we will all speak in the same tongue; to remove all these uncertainties with questions and answers in day to day life.
Life in the Confederation Helvetica has been of good quality, no doubting that but as they say in other German speaking countries – it’s all a bit too ‘special’. The dialogue is just a bit too far off being understandable to be something to tackle long term. It’s almost a language in its own right.
Ted and Scarlett were discussing over breakfast this morning our next place to live and it took me a few moments to register what they were on about. Scarlett was talking in her best words about diving with whales and big fish, she was keen to state that she wanted nothing to do with actually getting in the water or being anywhere near these whales, no, it was quite clear that Daddy was going to have to do this. Ted quantified this with a clear comparison to the big whale in the film “Finding Nemo”.
“Yes, that’s right” said Scarlett, “We’re going to live where ‘Memo’ lives”.
“In Sydney” said Ted.
All of a sudden it was as clear as a bell. The pair of them had worked out, without much help from me, that the place we are going to is the same as that in the film,
“so we must be looking for Nemo then Scarlett?” I asked.
“That’s right, Daddy and you’re going to go diving with the big whale…”
So that’s settled then.
Last night I found a new home for the Panzer. My lovely old Benz with its wedding-car white paintwork has been spotted sitting in its leafy abode by a fellow enthusiast and owner of at least one classic Fintail. Via our network of friends and neighbours he tracked me down to Switzerland and after a short negotiation on the phone we decided that it should not be allowed to sit and rust, but be towed to his dry warm garage and gradually put back to its former glorious state for motoring around La Sarthe. Of course there will be an exchange of a few hundred Euros in order to cover my costs of meeting him but mainly for the procurement of my next one…
For me that’s a top result. The thought of such a beautiful piece of late 60’s engineering just rotting into the ground was always quite disturbing. Its tyres stayed up in defiance, the body work was basically solid underneath tin-worm tattered door skins and its defining huge chrome bumpers weren’t even pitted through. The masterful ten rectangle grille stood proud and would quite happily clonk your skull as you pottered about under a raised bonnet. The sumptuous seats still had plenty of bounce in them and only some of the wood veneer was de-veneering. Fittingly that most iconic of car badges the three-pointed star signifying Daimler Benz’s dominance of land, sea and air shone bright as any star should. I’ve even been having trouble deciding what to do with the mechanical fuel injection pump that was removed in the false belief that two non-Mercedes specialists (there is a second villain involved in the skulduggery here…) could foolishly rebuild such a thing consisting of several hundred parts, built with the precision of a Swiss watch, using just a pair of pliers and a screwdriver. Now I don’t have to worry for it can be returned to its rightful place alongside the rest of the two point eight litre six cylinder engine that it once fed. If the two wana-bee Mercedes technicians involved here had been a little more patient the gummy old four-star causing the blockage to the finely machined valve bodies may have been cleared with some long-term soaking. However, that’s another story.
The confirmed Mercedes buff is well known in the area for his other classics and I feel he will be able to do the car justice. At the moment with our impending move to the other side of the world there is simply too much to contemplate for me to do anything constructive with it. He sounded most pleased to have scored another wreck to put alongside his collection of old Merc’s for doing up and now I don’t have to worry about what will happen to it for even if he does decide to dismantle it, I’ll never know.
Last night I tried to sit and take stock of the last week or so because quite simply I do not know whether I am coming or going just now. That wasn’t easy either as there was some kind of cleaning frenzy taking place chez Von Trapps. Every now and then the activities of a tribe of mess-making kids, me and the Phantom Untidiers who inhabit our house leave just too much to clear up and so the Great Clearer-Upper gets to work and turns the whole place inside out to clean it. So it was that I had, for part anyway, to join in.
Anyway some things are quite clear. I received a welcome phone call last week informing me that my situation d’emploi is set to change for the better and see me in a new office somewhere on the south-side of Sydney, Australia.
Excellent news indeed but merely the beginning of the increasingly complex process to actually get permission to go there. Gone are the days when one could simply call up the Embassy, make an appointment to see someone and fill out a standard form to confirm you actually were the person you said you were, get a stamp in your passport and book your flight or your boat ticket.
These days it’s incredible what has to be done. So much so, that I wouldn’t even dream of describing it here, suffice to say that we need photos of everyone, medicals for everyone, X-rays for some of us, proof that we are who we say we are (that’s going to be hard for the Phantom Untidiers), lists of what we’ve done at work confirmed to be true by the people who employed us, copies of bank statements, copies of qualifications, copies of letters to us, copies of photos of us and more official multi-page forms all filled out with even more copies and lists. And everything that has to be copied has to be a genuine certified copy that it is a real copy. Certified by someone who everyone knows is really and truly who they say they are. Thus ruling out the Phantom Untidiers as people who can certify our documents.
You get my drift. You can also see why it’s necessary to take stock because no matter how we try to simply make a checklist of things to do that we can tick off as we get them done, it seems like the process for getting to Australia is at the moment stuck in first gear revving its nuts off.
We will somehow find a way to change into second gear, that is assuming I don’t get felled by the mop handle sticking through the banisters, left there by the Great Clearer-Upper as I came down the stairs last night…
We first heard it in the back of the car whilst driving into Bern for a day out. Above the ambient cacophony of baby singing, toddlers rambling and arguing and the tzzk-tzzk, tzzk-tzzka, tzzk-tzzk of MP3 player set loud enough to be heard there appeared to be a frog in the car.
A bit hard to hear at first but there it was again, a croaking noise. Definitely a frog. Had Ted found one and smuggled it into the car?
We’d worry about it later.
After a joint schlepp round we split up into two groups so that I could take the toddlers off for a cursory visit to the most expensive toy shop in the world, Mum and Zoe could get some peaceful shopping in, arranging to meet up at a favourite restaurant for lunch. The arrow through the head had worked on our “just arrived at her teens” daughter and both ears were now properly pierced sporting pretty little sparkly studs. We went through the shopping bags and their contents, I have to say, with a little less enthusiasm than usual due to the dull ache in my head from the whisky ‘degustation’ the night before with some colleagues from work. That was my fault though and another story.
The food was a welcome relief, served up by our delightfully polite waiter whom we knew but whose name we couldn’t say until we asked him. Alam knows us from other visits.
Then all fell quiet at the table except for the munch-munch, clink-clink of knives and forks working away at ribs, burgers and fries as is often the case when long-awaited food turns up. It was all quiet until the frog piped up again. We looked first at each other and then smiled as the croaking began in earnest, it had suddenly become obvious where the frog had come from.
Scarlett sat at her place with a big fork in one hand, chicken nugget in the other, a serviette half-stuffed down her t-shirt and red ketchup making its way gradually across her face all the while burping away like a true master! One after the other came and when there was a lull it was duly forced out thus amplifying its tone.
As anyone in these situations knows, to repsond in a particular way is tantamount to starting a game that is impossible to stop. We tried at first to ignore it and it did go away only to return some minutes later once the audience were ready. Of course it’s impossible not to laugh and we sat there all together having a good old giggle.
Perhaps those far eastern countries have got it right?
