Notes From the Hard Shoulder - James May [38]
You see, this five-owner, 110,000-mile car is an utterly dependable old bus that I would happily drive to Australia tomorrow, and in the certain knowledge that I would get there. It has never, ever failed me. Of course, this being an old product of Land Rover, lots of little things have gone wrong with it, but here's the weird thing: they always mend themselves.
At first, I thought I was imagining this, but it's happened so many times now that I have to acknowledge something is going on. Items that you would get a garage to attend to but for which I have allowed nature to take its course have included a broken fan, two broken electric windows, the air conditioning, the air suspension controls, the headlight main beam switch, one of the seat motors, the rear windscreen wiper, the rev counter, the central locking and a slow puncture.
I swear I'm not making this up. In fact, it's beginning to give me the creeps a bit. Yesterday, a light bulb had blown in the instrument panel. Today, it glows like the star of David. If I go anywhere near this thing with a spanner or a screwdriver it immediately crosses that invisible line that separates the merely poorly from the dead. But if I leave it alone it eventually recovers. It's a bit like having a spot. Squeeze it and you will be left with a scar, but leave the job to time's patient skill and eventually it will disappear, leaving you with a completely unblemished nose. If I drive the Range Rover when several things are not working I can feel that it's slightly out of sorts, because some of its qi energy is being directed to the task of healing.
And to think that the occasional sandalled leftist has scrawled 'climate crime' and 'environment nazi' on its heavily soiled bonnet. Nothing could be more inappropriate, since what I have in my Range Rover is the world's first organic and alternative therapy vehicle; a truly living machine with the antibodies to mechanical ague coursing through its metal metabolism. It is, in fact, the most ethically correct, GM-free and plain greenest vehicle I have ever come across.
I mean it: if I leave it alone for a week, things grow on it.
POETRY ON MOTION
People of Britain, put aside your concerns over the cleanliness of hospitals, Gordon Brown's plans for public spending and trying to remember the name of the Liberal Democrats bloke. This election drudgery is of no more consequence than the captaincy of the local bowls club when set aside the great denouement that awaits you here; namely, the final and incontrovertible resolution of the Great Sports Car Debate.
I salute you, readers of Telegraph Motoring. Some weeks ago I asked you to settle a debate that has reverberated through lounge bars across the land for three generations: what, exactly, and in no more than 12 words, is the definition of a sports car? At stake was the future custody of a l/43rd-scale die-cast model of a Mazda MX-5 that has sat on the windowsill of my office for the last six years.
To be honest, I expected a handful of old biffers to write in about the Austin Healey 3000, and indeed they did. One of them even apologised. But there was more. From every corner of these sceptered isles the pithy missives flooded in; my letter-opener is like the bread knife in a busy sandwich bar, burnished and flashing in the morning sun, worn to half its original depth by the unrelenting slicing action of over 450 openings.
I have to say, though, that simply sending in the name, or even a picture, of your own car is not really good enough. On the other hand, Ms Hanya Gordon made it straight to the shortlist by including a bag of American Hard Gums, while anyone who had the temerity to dismiss my old 911 was immediately filed under 'B'.
There was a man who called me a big jessie for not buying a TR6, a man who said 'sports car' was a contradiction in terms, some misleading stuff about driving gloves and bonnet straps, and quite a bit of chicanery involving complex phrases that formed