El Escritor Inglés: 2013

Sunday, November 17, 2013

Home Ground Strangers

Within months of heading off to university, in the autumn of 1985, my local record shop closed down for good. X ergo Y, according to those who knew me, given the time and money I spent there. It resembled Aladdin’s Cave: just 150 square feet of ground-floor clutter, plywood shelves and racks, all buckling under the weight of cardboard record sleeves, and never enough elbow room to peruse in comfort.

On the wall above the counter was a video monitor playing current hits in an hour-long loop. (Tellingly, I would often hear the same song three times on a Saturday afternoon.) This was just four years after MTV began, and pop videos were becoming an integral part of music marketing.

One such video I remember better than any other. It had clearly been made on a miniscule budget. A bunch of seemingly down-at-heel (yet highly-talented) musicians were performing to a handful of cameras, scurrying among which was an unruly collection of farmyard animals. I had no idea what message they were trying to convey, but the song was brilliant. An exquisite blend of melodic soul and politically-aware post-punk rock, its punchy piano-and-brass introduction alone captured my attention. I bought it, on 10” vinyl (Figure 68.1), without even asking the name of the band.

Figure 68.1: The song reached only number 69 in the UK singles charts.

The lyrics, too, stuck in my head – and have remained there ever since.

‘Egos soar as glasses crack

And promises weighed by the pound

Greedy fingers slapping backs

As strangers walk on my home ground.’

They certainly do. For decades, now, mass immigration has been the issue that dared not speak its name. Until recently, any British politician brave enough even to mention it was branded xenophobic and, ultimately, risked his career. (Q: What is a racist? A: Someone who is winning an argument with a leftist.) The truth, nonetheless, is that since I bought that treasured recording, the island’s population has rocketed from 56.5 million to 63.2 million. It is forecast, conservatively, to pass 70 million within another twenty years.

Such a rapid and unprecedented influx is unsustainable. It is also dangerous, given that immigrant assimilation has, in the name of political correctness, been actively discouraged. Today, chronic social unrest is bubbling inexorably to the surface. The city of Sheffield is an alarming case in point. Just this week, the British press – including leftist havens such as the Guardian – have reported that friction between the city’s indigenous residents and gangs of Roma itinerants might soon precipitate street riots (Figure 68.2). Given the upsurge in the immigrants’ anti-social behaviour and associated squalor (Figure 68.3), it is not surprising.

Figure 68.2: A common scene on a Sheffield street in 2013

Figure 68.3: Forty years ago, the late Enoch Powell (1912-98), a controversial British politician, warned against the dangers of mass immigration and subsequent non-assimilation. He said: ‘It is like watching a nation busily engaged in heaping up its own funeral pyre.’ The vast, expanding pyre awaits a single match.

So, why have successive governments sanctioned such a harmful demographic revolution, in the light of such predictable consequences? It is obvious. Read either Machiavelli or Orwell. The first and principal objective of any ruling elite is the preservation and perpetuation of its own status. Mass immigration has been engineered for three main reasons:

1. To thrust multiculturalism down the throats of the indigenous British people, thus weakening their cultural unity, and hence potential for collective political rebellion;

2. To undermine organized labour and replace the proletariat with a dirt-cheap alternative; and

3. To import, en masse, ready-partisan voters, willing to help preserve the Establishment in return for State handouts.

It has worked. Sadly, the integrity of the British nation is considered to be of far less importance. Of course, so long as the UK remains a member of the European Union, a free-for-all immigration policy is irrevocable. As economic hardship entrenches itself ever further, urban communities are dividing themselves along ethnic lines. This is ominous. British cities could explode at any time.

Whether that ’80s protest song was written as a prophecy of the consequence of uncontrolled immigration, I do not know. Still, there is no escaping the supreme irony that a fundamentally left-wing policy of forced multiculturalism has precipitated an extreme right-wing reality of de facto apartheid. Things can only get ... worse.

Monday, October 07, 2013

Abandoned Ship

The sight of a decaying ship compels the viewer to contemplate and speculate on its history. The same, I suppose, goes for derelict buildings, ancient coins, works of art and even so-called ‘senior citizens’. A ship is different, though: its decay and demise tend to be far more staged and drawn-out, allowing the world more time to ponder its past. Perhaps being the great-grandson of a Master Mariner (Figure 67.1) stirs me to think in this way.

Figure 67.1: My seafaring ancestor, MM William Sandeman of Dundee, Scotland

Copyright expired

A mere three miles from where I was born, and just half a mile from where my father grew up, one famous old vessel spent its final, incongruous days. The SS Great Eastern, an iron steam ship designed by the world-renowned engineer Isambard Kingdom Brunel (1806-59), was, at the time, easily the largest ship ever constructed. Weighing almost 19,000 tonnes, she was employed primarily as a passenger steamer between Britain and North America, and laid the first transatlantic telegraph cable.

Forty years after her 1858 launch, the Great Eastern was berthed at Rock Ferry, England, on the west bank on the River Mersey (Figure 67.2), and broken up with a huge wrecking ball. The public demolition process took eighteen months, such were the robustness and integrity of the metal structure. To this day, it is possible to walk along the shore and discover fragments of the ship’s keel and hull partially submerged in the silt.

Figure 67.2: Brunel’s ‘Great Babe’, the SS Great Eastern, moored at Rock Ferry in the 1880s

Copyright expired. Photograph: Allan C. Green (1878-1954). Source: State Library of Victoria

Of course, the late 1880s were a little before my time. There is, however, for the benefit of any current shipwreck enthusiasts, another vessel – albeit only a quarter of the size of the Great Eastern – beached on the coast of North Wales. The TSS Duke of Lancaster, a passenger ship (Figure 67.3) formerly owned by the State-owned British Railways, operated from 1956 until 1979. Ever since, she has remained landlocked on the Welsh bank of the River Dee (Figure 67.4) and can be seen from miles out beyond the estuary. Immediately after permanent docking, she served as a highly original ‘Fun Ship’ tourist attraction. However, commercial success was fleeting. The perennial short-sightedness and stupidity of local politicians – never reluctant to pick fights using other people’s money – saw to that. The ship’s abandonment and subsequent dereliction became inevitable.

Figure 67.3: The TSS Duke of Lancaster, while operational in the 1970s

Figure 67.4: The Duke, today, as seen from above

I took my family to see the forlorn Duke in the summer. (Access is tricky. The best option is to park at the nearby Abakhan, a very popular fabric store, although it would be correct and courteous to pay it a visit and buy something first. From the rear of the car park, walk along the adjacent path, under the railway bridge, keeping left until the ship comes into view.)

My kids were not overly impressed. The youngest was even a little spooked. In fact, I doubt I have ever witnessed a scene more desolate. Grey clouds seemed to descend just as I took out my camera. Everything was cordoned off with razor wire, suspended above unkempt shrubs, and the sounds from the busy fabric store were too distant to be audible. It was ghostly, as if by design.

The ship’s exposed body has recently been covered with bold, brightly-coloured graffiti, some of them quite grotesque (Figures 67.5, 67.6, 67.7 & 67.8). Much of this artwork has been completed by a Latvian artist who goes by the name of ‘Kiwie’. Disregarding his more sinister creations, the ‘Three Wise Monkeys’ and lifelike portrait of the ship’s first captain are admirable.

Figure 67.5: Going nowhere, thirty-four years and counting

Figure 67.6: The captain looks not dissimilar to my great-grandfather (Figure 67.1)

Figure 67.7: The ‘Three Wise Monkeys’ are visible in the centre of the picture

Figure 67.8: ‘Art is never finished, only abandoned.’

Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519)

Despite the evident rust and ruin, the vessel is reputed to be in relatively sound condition. Ever the dreamer, I wonder: what will remain of her in ten, fifty, one hundred years’ time? I cannot say, but I am certain that she will remain at that same spot until every last rivet has corroded to dust.

Monday, September 30, 2013

Laissez-faire It Ain't

AN OPEN REPLY

Dear J-A,

Thank you for your recent email. How you contrived to send it to me, under the circumstances, remains a mystery, but I shall do my best to defend the remarks I made.

Let us begin on common ground. Total economic collapse of the West is now inevitable. On that we are agreed. Owing to the irreversible increase in sovereign debt, your beloved USA is disintegrating before the world’s eyes. It saddens me too. I have loved its geography and culture since my first visit, in 1988, and will always admire the optimism and patriotism bursting ceaselessly from its people.

US sovereign debt has since risen from $2.6 trillion to $16.7 trillion dollars. It increases by approximately $2 billion per day – and that figure itself is rising fast. There are also trillions in off-balance-sheet liabilities, but that would be almost too terrifying to address. Anyhow, there are five ways a government can pay down its debt.

(1) Raise taxes. This would be universally unpopular, especially in such a precarious economic climate, and would probably prove counterproductive to recovery.

(2) Slash public expenditure. This would be political suicide for anyone even to suggest it. Net recipients, growing in number by the day, would almost certainly vote against, and one could hardly expect otherwise.

(3) Borrow (by issuance of government bonds). This works up to a point. However, the US is ‘maxed out’ and now unable to raise sufficient funds from the markets because its interest rates are unattractively low. However, increasing them would lead to an epidemic of bankruptcies, repossessions and, ultimately, a collapse of the banking system, so that option has been dismissed out of pure fear.

(4) Print money (by so-called ‘quantitative easing’). By so doing, the US is obliged to buy its own debt. This expands the money supply, fuelling inflation, which shrinks the debt in real terms. It is the modus operandi of insolvent governments and central banks. Having already taken this route, Federal Reserve chairman Ben Bernanke is left with two choices: continue QE and cause hyperinflation (a slow death); or switch off the printing presses and let interest rates spike upwards (a quick one). As much as Mr Bernanke talks about curbing QE, only the economically illiterate believe he will ever do so. He is simply buying time.

(5) Direct confiscation of private financial assets. The prospect of ‘bail-ins’ is indeed shocking, but a precedent has been set. Cypriot bank accounts have recently been raided, as have pension funds in Poland, and the Bank of England has drawn up detailed plans – www.fdic.gov/about/srac/2012/gsifi.pdf – to confiscate anything upward of £85,000 from British bank accounts, with no obligation of prior warning.

Before you remind me, the UK, too, is sinking into the abyss. Few acknowledge it, though, and most people seem blissfully unaware of what lies ahead. Likewise most other European countries, whose public finances are equally dire.

From here, however, I must disagree with you. The imminent collapse does not reflect the failure of laissez-faire capitalism, which, for all its faults, is predicated on free markets. Today, in practice, this concept is non-existent, thanks to QE bailing out overleveraged banks, housing bubbles, gold-price manipulation and interest-rate suppression. There is nothing ‘free’ about any of it. The stock market, too, is a powerful case in point. QE has inflated share prices to artificial, unsustainable heights. Take, for example, the company for which I have worked since 2008. Since then, its annual profits have doubled (Figure 66.1), and yet its share price has rocketed almost five-fold (Figure 66.2). For those of us who invested in 2008, this is a wonderful bonus, but anyone currently considering buying its shares is risking substantial losses should the stock market revert to its natural state.

Figure 66.1: The company’s profits have increased healthily in recent years, although I admit that its success is not entirely down to me! (You have no need to remind me that it paid no UK corporation tax in its last financial year; I already know.) EBITA, incidentally, stands for Earnings Before the deduction of Interest, Tax and Amortization expenses.

Figure 66.2: Stock market performance (2008-2013)

All of these are the unnatural consequences of blatant State and corporate intervention. We are witnessing the largest redistribution of wealth in human history – from the prudent to the profligate, and from ordinary working folk to the banksters and their cronies.

We could legitimately call it corporate fascism (Figure 66.3), or corporate socialism, but laissez-faire capitalism it most certainly ain’t.

Figure 66.3: As long ago as 1790, banking dynasty founder Mayer Amschel Bauer Rothschild (1744-1812) said: ‘Give me control of a nation’s money supply, and I care not who makes its laws.’ His dismissiveness was not mere conceit. Two centuries on, the world’s reserve currency, the US dollar, is being printed and thus debased to its intrinsic value – nothing – as all fiat currencies eventually are.

Yours ever,

El Escritor Inglés

Friday, August 09, 2013

Was This The Real Life?

‘If I had a time machine and could relive only one day, this would probably be it.’

http://www.queenzone.com/forums/1226425/a-couple-of-hopefully-interesting-facts-about-knebworth-1986.aspx

Those words are not mine. The sentiment, however, might well be.

To misquote the Beatles: it was twenty-seven years ago today. 9th August, 1986 fell on a Saturday. I was a twenty-year-old undergraduate who spent most of his time listening to music and reading anything that wasn’t on the syllabus. During the four-month-long summer break, I wandered through town with my best pal who noticed a small poster in a record shop window: Queen Live in Concert £28 Including Travel (Figure 65.1). I had only £35 to my name, and he was only marginally better off. So in we went.

Figure 65.1: Advertisement for Knebworth ’86

Five minutes later, we re-emerged with tickets for the Knebworth Festival (Figure 65.2) and empty pockets. Neither of us cared about the latter.

Figure 65.2: Despite an audience of ‘only’ 120,000, I must have met twice that number over the years who claimed to have been there.

On the morning of the concert, we dragged ourselves to the bus station in time for a sleepy five o’clock departure. The journey was meant to take five hours, but that turned into seven, owing to serious traffic congestion on the A1. Five miles from the venue, there was total gridlock. What happened next still makes me smile. Four headbangers in an old Mini lost patience with the hold-up. They bumped onto the central reservation and began to overtake everyone – on the grass. On the vehicle’s roof, strapped onto a roof-rack with grappling hooks, was a beer barrel which was almost as big as the car itself. Attached to the plastic tap was one end of a length of rubber hose, while the other was being passed between the driver and his boozed-up passengers. The whole spectacle was unreal, particularly when they were finally apprehended by the Hertfordshire Police. More haste, less speed – and no concert.

Under the midday summer sun, we walked the last mile to the corner of a vast, gently-sloping field. No one seemed to have realized that alcohol was prohibited, despite it having been printed on the tickets. Consequently, just outside the entrance gate was a stupendous mass of cans, bottles, cases and crates, all abandoned by those already inside. Unsurprisingly, the rest of us took full advantage before entering the site, which, incidentally, had no toilets (Figure 65.3).

Figure 65.3: My pal and I are somewhere in this shot. More information and pictures from arguably Britain’s greatest ever outdoor rock festival can be found at: http://www.ukrockfestivals.com/Knebworth-festival-1986.html

The first support band, a bunch of unknowns called Belouis Some, were pelted with plastic cups, bottles and clods of turf from first chord to last. Next came Status Quo, veterans of British rock festivals, who were far better received. During their set, some roadie climbed onto the top of the stage proscenium and managed to keep his balance while miming with an outrageously large cardboard ‘guitar’. The penultimate band, Big Country, a folk-rock quartet from Scotland, were superb. Their summer hit Look Away reminds me of the day more than any other tune.

Finally, Queen appeared just before sunset (Figure 65.4). The incomparable Freddie Mercury exploded into life, covered every square inch of the stage, swore and chucked water at the audience, and, along with the other three band members, convinced all 120,000 of us that our money could not have been better spent.

Figure 65.4: Queen (Freddie Mercury, Brian May, John Deacon and Roger Taylor) never appeared on stage again. Freddie was diagnosed with AIDS the following year and died, aged 45, on 24th November, 1991. He was, and always will be, a one-off.

‘There have been some rumours,’ he yelled, ‘about a band ... called Queen ... and they say that we’re going to split up!’ Freddie paused for effect. ‘Well, fuck ’em!’ he went on. ‘I mean, really! They must think we’re stupid!’ None of us knew at the time that the gossip, tragically, was not without foundation.

After listening to, among many other rock classics, Bohemian Rhapsody, Radio Ga Ga and We Are The Champions, we shuffled out of the dark field, onto the A1 carriageway and back into town, oblivious to the fact that, somewhere in the crowd, a man had been stabbed to death and a woman had just given birth.

After a long return journey, we arrived back at square one, tired and disorientated, at 5 o’clock in the morning, exactly twenty-four hours after we had initially left.

So, was this the real life? No, Freddie, it was immeasurably better.

Sunday, July 28, 2013

Wildlife Rediscovered

In the long-running British sitcom Last of the Summer Wine (1973-2010), there was an amusing subplot in which an elderly junk shop proprietor called Auntie Wainwright would find ingenious ways of selling unwanted merchandise to customers who were nowhere near as sharp as she was. If some unsuspecting sap crossed her threshold in search of, say, a kettle, his arm would be up his back in a split second, and he would exit the place, somewhat shaken, clutching a garden rake or a couple of rickety dining chairs. Consequently, I have always been wary of entering any small store in which the only other person is the shopkeeper. Could I retain the willpower to keep my wallet in my pocket, if push came to a hard-sell shove? It is perhaps similar to submitting to hypnosis while mistrusting one’s own ability to resist an absurd suggestion.

Yesterday, my partner and I visited a sprawling crafts-and-antiques centre in the middle of the English countryside. Each ‘unit’ – there were about ten in all – was a converted farm building, manned by an Auntie Wainwright clone, and crammed so full with weird junk that if either of us had sneezed, the entire contents might well have come crashing down on top of us. We were on the lookout for a small wooden platform for a potted plant and some antique silver kitchen knives – her obsession, not mine.

A large proportion of the displays consisted of items which had survived from ‘the decade that taste forgot’ – a.k.a. the 1970s. Every couple of minutes, one or both of us would point at some tasteless contrivance and confess: ‘Urgh, we used to have one of those.’ There were faded postcards, impractical coffee pots, long-forgotten Christmas annuals, manual typewriters and a ghastly, whitewashed wrought iron-and-glass telephone table which we both swore to have seen somewhere before.

For the first hour, my wallet remained strapped to my leg. Despite having not bought anything – yet – it was a captivating place, the closest we could have come to time-travel, and we wandered around in a sort of silent 1970s haze. Whenever I commented on some insignificant detail, she would poke fun at my elephantine memory for useless information, and I would reciprocate about hers resembling a (1970s) colander. (There again, some of life is just as well forgotten.)

After we had scanned innumerable objetos de la nostalgia, one item stopped us both in our tracks. Semi-discarded in a small wicker basket, almost at ground level, was The World Wildlife Collection Card (Figure 64.1), published in 1971, a copy of which we had both owned as children. It was a promotional item, courtesy of Shell Oil and The World Wildlife Fund. The album, a single, folded piece of card, had cost 25 pence (£3 in today’s money), and with each purchase of Shell petrol (Figure 64.2), a 7 x 5 cm lenticular print of an exotic animal would be handed over with the receipt.

Figure 64.1: ‘The World Wildlife Fund exists to back the planning, research and education necessary to conserve for the benefit and enjoyment of mankind, each of the thousand endangered species of wild animals and enough of the wild places they live in to ensure their survival. Many of these species, some of which are featured in the Shell series of 3-D prints, are in immediate danger of extinction. We desperately need to stop this tragedy. This is why Shell and the WWF have worked together to produce a magnificent album. The more people understand the problems we face the more we can do. I think it is really up to us all, in our duty as citizens of the world, to help. If only for the sake of our grandchildren.’ – Sir Peter Markham Scott (1909-89), in 1971

Figure 64.2: Petrol pumps, in the UK, as they were in 1971

I remembered there were sixteen prints in total (Figure 64.3), four to a page, although neither of us had managed to collect them all. Each could be pasted into its own space, underneath which was a paragraph of information about where and how the animal lived. The picture surfaces were, at the time, revolutionary, and made an indescribably cool sound when scraped with a five-year-old’s fingernail.

Figure 64.3: Almost all sixteen species remain endangered, some critically so.

I picked up the album and opened it out carefully. All sixteen prints were present, each pristine and glued precisely in its rightful place. As we looked at each ‘3D’ image, some of our oldest memory cells were switched on for the first time in forty years. It could almost have been the very album one of us had once owned. I handed it over the counter to Auntie Wainwright without even asking the price.

We had gone there looking for a retro plant stand and some kitchen knives ... and come out in a nostalgic trance, proudly holding a small part of our childhood (Figure 64.4).

Cheers, Auntie.

Figure 64.4: Please send me an email if this article has rekindled memories.

Monday, July 08, 2013

Smells Like Double Dip

A dear friend of mine passed away several weeks ago. His cancer had been diagnosed only in March of this year, so it seemed merciful that his suffering was not further prolonged. His wife – they had been together for fifteen years – was, and remains, distraught, and turned to me to sort out all the financial matters and laborious paperwork.

Most of it has been straightforward. Only one matter has caused difficulty, having me sad one minute, raging the next. The two of them bought a timeshare several years ago from what she assured me was a ‘reputable timeshare company’. A blatant contradiction in terms, you might be thinking. Over the past decade, they enjoyed all-season holidays in Andalucía, and I suppose they always tried to make the best of a dubious deal. What I did not know is that, after they had received the tragic prognosis from the hospital, they were approached by a ‘seemingly legitimate’ firm offering to sell the timeshare for them – and it already had a potential buyer. The firm demanded €600 up front; but the alarm bells failed to ring. No proper selling agent either expects, less still demands, payment prior to completion. It was, of course, a simple scam. The ‘business’ was found to have operated from false addresses, and its owners will by now have disappeared into the night. I learned of it only after my friend’s death. He was a gentle soul, always giving others the benefit of the doubt (Figure 63.1).

Figure 63.1: My friend’s lack of cynicism was his Achilles’ heel.

Shortly after the funeral, his wife – I dislike the word ‘widow’ – told me that she had been contacted by a Spanish law firm investigating timeshare fraud, and that it would apparently cost nothing for them to pursue the matter on her behalf. I collected the entire documentation last week but, before I had found time to digest it, she had been contacted several more times by the ‘fraud-busters’. Each time, however, she explained to them that I would be dealing with all matters henceforth.

My first reaction was that lawyers do not come free, nor cheap, nor anything other than ludicrously, unjustifiably expensive. (The old joke that they do not look out of their office windows in the mornings because it gives them something to do in the afternoons does hold an element of truth – and yes, I have worked for a law firm.) Secondly, given Data Protection legislation, how did they find everything out? Thirdly, such cold-calling is illegal under Spanish Law.

So I phoned the firm, which is based in Málaga, and spoke with the person responsible. As I suspected, only the initial consultation was free. There would be a €1000 retainer; costs would pile up in typical lawyerly fashion; and, naturally, there would be a less than perfect chance of recovering any money. I told them cold-calling was illegal and threatened to report them to the Consejo General de la Abogacía Española (Spanish Law Society). There has not been a squeak from them since.

Sadly, there was more to come, from yet another cold-caller with my friend’s details from heaven-knows-where. This time I shall name the company. It is Milestone Data, supposedly based in London. I checked the address they provided: 145-157, St John Street, EC1V 4PY. This is registered to a company called London Presence, a (presumably) legitimate business which, for as little as £15 per month, provides mail-redirection services to clients who are, self-evidently, nowhere near London. Furthermore, Milestone Data is not registered at Companies House. (This is the British government’s Registrar of Companies which requires, by law, annual submissions, all of which are made publicly available.) I told them, in no uncertain terms, to back off.

Something else has since occurred to me. If a client has been tricked once, cold-callers with inside information would logically assume that he or she might fall for a follow-up ‘double-dip’ scam, particularly if the second firm offers to track down the first set of crooks and make them pay, on the basis of ‘your enemy’s enemy is your friend’. Such a premise is dangerously unsound. Moreover, who is to say that the first scammer and the second are not in cahoots, or even one and the same?

My friend belonged to a different age. His wife can scarcely believe the unlawful depths which fellow humans will plumb in the name of financial gain. They were a good match, both born way after their time to a world becoming increasingly devious, and shameless, in its criminality. I do not expect it to improve (Figure 63.2).

Figure 63.2: El escritor escribiendo. So long, MMB. I shall keep my word.

Monday, June 10, 2013

Sunshine On The Track

A few months ago, for the article An Evening At Honda, I wrote about meeting British Touring Car Champions Matt Neal (2005, 2006 & 2011) and ‘Flash’ Gordon Shedden (2012). From that evening onwards, my sons were champing at the bit to see them race. Very little persuasion in my direction was needed. I bought tickets for the fourth of this season’s meetings, at Oulton Park (Figure 62.1), which took place yesterday.

Figure 62.1: Programme front cover

Advance booking any outdoor activity in England is a risky enterprise. We were always going to be at the mercy of weather which changes in accordance with Sod’s Law. I had kept my fingers crossed since March, and it worked: 20°C with hazy sunshine, and the setting was perfect. Oulton Park is situated in rural Cheshire (Figure 62.2), a peaceful and largely unspoiled county in the Northwest of England. It is a beautiful circuit, stretching down a gentle hill towards a tree-lined lake, just outside the village of Little Budworth.

Figure 62.2: An aerial photograph of Oulton Park. We were stationed at the top-left corner of the ‘square’.

The weather, combined with the prospect of an exciting race timetable, ensured a sell-out. Scattered among the crowds were tents of all shapes and colours, camper vans, picnic blankets, and even a converted jeep with a couple of deckchairs anchored to its roof. Everywhere smelt of barbecues. (If any non-Brits consider our seven-spades-no-trumps attitude to sunny weather to be over the top, let me point out that it never pays to take it for granted. The summer constantly threatens to end tomorrow.)

The entire set-up was family-orientated, certainly more so than Formula One. Before the races began, the pit lanes were opened, and we were free to meet the drivers and their staff. My sons made a beeline for the Honda section, where the ever-friendly ‘Matt and Flash’ – the boys, amusingly, now speak of them almost as if they are family – were signing autographs and chatting casually to fans (Figures 62.3, 62.4 & 63.5). Reigning champion Shedden remarked that he loved the festival atmosphere at Oulton Park, especially on such a warm day, although it did mean that the temperature inside the car could become stifling.

Figure 62.3: Honda drivers Matt Neal and Gordon Shedden prior to racing

Figure 62.4: Autographs for the boys

Figure 62.5: Three road hogs in the making, pictured with Honda’s race technicians

We wandered around for a while and located the perfect trackside spec. The racing began at 12:30 p.m.: three Touring Car rounds along with Formula Ford and several other classes. The first and second Touring Car races (both 15-lap) saw Matt finish 6th and 4th, and Flash 3rd and 2nd (Figure 62.6), with MG’s Jason Plato storming to victory in both.

Figure 62.6: ‘Flash’ flashes by on a sun-drenched track.

After tea, I watched the boys run themselves ragged in the adventure playground and we explored the numerous stalls and displays provided by the participating constructors. Enthusiasts of all ages could hardly fail to enjoy what was on offer.

We settled back at trackside, this time opposite the lake, for the third and final BTCC race (Figure 62.7). There was to be no hat-trick of wins for Plato: his MG caught fire after four laps. There were other incidents too. A tightly-packed field led to one or two bumps and emergency detours onto the grass verges. Matt pressurized the leaders throughout, even negotiating a chicane on two wheels, and finished a creditable fourth. Despite performing well in the previous two races, the day ended in disappointment for Flash, finishing at the back of the field, which visibly upset my five-year-old son.

Figure 62.7: Final race, first lap, with Matt and Flash starting in 7th and 8th positions respectively

We made a quick getaway once the last race was concluded. I did not cherish the prospect of being stuck in bottlenecked traffic for an hour, so I shot along a very convenient rat-run leading from Shaw’s Gate exit to the delightful town of Tarporley (see Mobberley’s HedgeHopper). Within minutes of leaving the Park, we were cruising through the Cheshire countryside, windows wound down and reliving a grand day out (Figure 62.8). I dare say I shall have no choice but to take the boys again next year – just as I had hoped.

Figure 62.8: Tickets for Oulton Park 2013