If the question sounded stale from overuse, at least what enticed it was zingily fresh.
‘Have you,’ asked Rebecca, the wife with whom I do not by and large cohabit, ‘gone completely mad?’
I drained the tumbler, refilled it and despairingly cradled my head. ‘Sweet Lord Jesus,’ I murmured, ‘what is wrong with me?’
Becca wearily raised her brows, as if to suggest the question was far too broad and multifaceted to be addressed in the one sitting. Or, come to that, one lifetime. ‘This isn’t good,’ was all she could muster. ‘This is not good at all.’
At first glance, the remark that provoked the above Socratic dialogue may very well seem innocuous. All I had said, immediately before the sanity-related enquiry, was this: ‘He’s actually not that awful, is he? I mean, you can kinda see why people like him.’
But he is that awful, Nigel Farage, isn’t he? He’s every inch that awful, and then some.
‘What made me say it?’ I whined as the race-baiting horror ingested the scrotum or anus, or whatever, of a kangaroo, or crocodile, or whatever. We were in Becca’s Dorset cottage watching the rancid old scrote, as you will have divined, on I’m A Celebrity…
Theories concerning this latest branch of derangement were duly aired. I posited that it was connected with my having newly turned 60. 'It's such a truism that people get more right-wing as they age,' I conjectured, 'so maybe it's that.'
‘Nah,’ she insisted. ‘If anything, you get more left-wing. You still miss Corbyn.’
She had a point. ‘In that case, might I be having a stroke?’
She intently examined my face for drooping features. ‘Nope, you look OK. Mind you, your speech is pretty slurred,’ she added, ‘but then again you have had half a bottle of Scotch.’
We sat there in bamboozled silence for a while. Then she had a eureka moment.
‘I’ve got it,’ she exploded. ‘It’s your father’s Jaguar!’
A month or so ago, I arranged for a charity to collect that 2003 vehicle, which had sat idle and unused for three years since my father stopped driving some months before he died.
But when the guy came to take it away, sentiment intervened. I simply couldn’t tolerate the idea of his beloved car being scrapped. So I spent a small fortune on taxing, insuring, MOTing and servicing it.
And now I’ve fallen head over heels. It isn’t a raving beauty like Morse’s Mark 2. It’s one of those slightly bulbous S-Type models, as favoured by the sort of elderly, dithery Faragist who frets about ‘being swamped’ by immigrants in a rural village that hasn’t seen a person of colour since a coach driver dramatically misread a roadmap en route to Leicester in 1983.
My dad, I should add, was by no means a fan of Farage and his poisonous world view. But he did love that car, and I can now appreciate why. The walnut steering wheel, the cream leather seats, the superb engineering, cruise control and the other cute gadgets… It’s such a luxuriant joy to drive that I suddenly feel insulted by my underpowered little Audi.
You’ll probably have read about people who take on the personality traits of previous owners of the hearts transplanted into them. There seems to be a similar phenomenon with cars.
In the Jag, for instance, it takes me 19 seconds (18.97 seconds longer than in the Audi) to react to a change of traffic-light colour. I like to maintain a steady 56mph, generally in the fast lane, on motorways. I’ve been contemplating the purchase of a tweed cap.
In a startling neo-Ovidian metamorphosis, to sum up, the Jag is transforming me into a geezer loosely modelled on Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino.
If salvation lies anywhere, it is in the fuel consumption. The car does 4¼ yards to the gallon. By the time you reach the petrol station exit after filling up, the tank is almost empty. You could spend eternity trapped in a forecourt infinity loop, like some Jag-driving Sisyphus.
‘Given that you can’t afford to heat your house, you’ll have to leave it here and take the train home,’ instructed Becca when she caught me grinning indulgently at the chewing Farage.
‘Besides, another week of driving it, and you’ll be seeing the upside of a second term for Donald Trump.’
So there I left the vehicle I am alarmingly tempted to call ‘the old girl’. It – she – is on the drive facing a field in which lives a venerable horse put out to grass. The pair can look at each other and recognise kindred spirits as they see out their days in peaceful seclusion.
How long the detoxification process will take is unclear. But, a week after bidding the Jaguar farewell, if anyone asked me what I want from Santa, I’d have to plump for a Jeremy Clarkson T-shirt, annual membership of the Reform Party and a natty pair of stringback driving gloves.
The Oldie January 2024
