All a dream...

8:48am Monday 14th July 2008

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The Scribbler emerged from the steaming shower cubicle, half a worn cake of Carbolic soap in his hand and the sudden realisation that it had all been a dream.

It was just like that old American soap opera, Dallas. While soaping himself in the shower he had drifted into a nostalgic parallel universe where he hadn’t in fact, traded in the old Austin Gearcruncher for a tandem bicycle some months ago.

He was missing the old motor, it seemed, if he was having daydreams about it in the shower. As he dried himself off with a handful of Old Enraptured Ragamuffin-branded bar towels filched from the Boilermaker’s Arms, he pondered the great, yawning chasm inside him left by the lack of a car.

True, he didn’t really need one – he only tended to go between the T&A offices and his local pub, judging from recent columns. And the price of petrol meant he probably couldn’t afford to run one anyway. But he missed the freedom of having a car. Missed the spontaneous appeal of leaping into the driving seat, throwing the A-Z open and simply taking off, a wild and free spirit, going where he would at the behest of no man. Why, sometimes he used to go as far afield as Apperley Bridge or coast down to the borderlands with Calderdale. Truly, the world was your lobster when you had a car.

“I need a car,” announced The Scribbler. Thelma Gusset (pronounced “Gussay”), the fragrant women’s editor of the T&A, glared at him across the newsroom after he’d made this pronouncement.

“No you do not,” she said. “You’ve got a tandem. Why do you need a car? You never go anywhere.”

“Ah,” said The Scribbler cleverly. “But if I did have a car, then I could go places. We could go places.”

“Like where?” sniffed Thelma suspiciously.

The Scribbler played his trump card. “How about that big bargain outlet up the motorway?”

He had her, and she knew it. Thelma narrowed her eyes and shook her fist at him in a Mack Sennett “Why you...” kind of way. She couldn’t resist a bargain outlet, and The Scribbler knew it.

“Well, look into it,” she said non-committally, returning to the Primark catalogue to choose a bikini for if the weather ever got any better.

The Scribbler immediately repaired to his broom cupboard on the third floor, which doubled as his living-work space and which held his ancient computer. He immediately logged on to the internet and typed “cheap cars” into the search engine.

An hour later and he was engrossed in eBay, although he was at pains to point out to his readers that other web-based auction sites are available. Something had caught his eye and he was greedily drinking in the pictures posted on the site by the vendor.

It was an Austin Gearcruncher Mark V. Incredibly, incredibly rare. Austin, after the problems with the Mark IV – to wit, that it was rubbish – had ceased production of their Gearcruncher model. But before that they had begun looking at a Mark V, which was eventually deemed a pointless exercise. A couple of test models had been produced, though, and this was evidently one of them.

It had a 750cc engine and a boot that you could probably just stick a dozen eggs into (without the box). It had been, for some reason, painted a vivid purple decorated with yellow and white daisies at some point during its unhappy life. The windscreen was cracked and the bonnet had a crumple in the middle that suggested a rather nasty crash had occurred.

The Scribbler loved it. And there were only minutes left in the auction. Uncertainly, he placed the cursor over the “Bid Now” button and his finger hovered over the mouse clicker...

To be continued...