The Word Cloud

Today began with a visit to a car dealership. (Well, almost. It actually began with my daughter's school assembly, a humorous and well-performed take on the Ancient Greeks that started with a completely random rendition of Jessie J's Pricetag. Perhaps it was the 'we need to take you back in time.' Anyway. I've only just begun and already I've digressed.)

Where was I? The car. To a dealership. It's developed a squeak that sounds like a repertory company of mice has moved into the boot to continually rehearse the shower scene from Psycho. A cheery 'Leave it with us' meant that the bus home beckoned. This being Clapham, I became the genuine Man on the Clapham Omnibus. How prosaic. However this particular MOTCO had stupidly forgotten to bring anything to read, so my mind, possibly encouraged by the aforementioned randomness of Ms J's work vis a vis Ancient Greeks, began to wander.

'I've had a lot of cars over the years,' I thought.

And then later -


'I've read a lot of books over the years.' I thought.

(Told you it was random.)

'What if the cars had been books?' I thought, warming to the pointless nature of such random deliberation. Well let's see...

First up, there was the Triumph 1500TC. A vision in chocolate brown with creamy-white go-faster/just-bloody-go stripes, like an automotive spongecake. A pretender, I decided, a book about a boy wizard called Henry Porter, a car that so wanted to be a Triumph Dolomite but had neither the verve nor the geography of its Italian mountain-named cousin.

A Vauxhall Cavalier followed this. A work of non-fiction, probably about something dull but worthy, like How To Carve A Peruvian Noseflute or Loft Lagging Made Easy. Next up was the celebrity autobiography. Not a proper, lots of talent and erudite to boot type of celebrity. More of your 'I was in Big Brother once' or 'I used to go out with a footballer' type of celebrity. I give you the Opel Manta GT. In red. With a hand-wound sunroof and a deep front spoiler. All flashy appearance with not much else to say for itself.

Then came the novella, a car whose bookish self would have been trumpeted as a work of greatness but on inspection was actually struggling to qualify for the term 'novel' due to its paucity of pages. Think, perhaps, On Chesil Beach. The vehicle in question was a Fiat X-19. (I know, I know. It was a long time ago.) Somewhere around this time, a Mini Metro Van den Plas (no less) entered my life. Not for long. It really shouldn't have made it out of the slushpile.

There was another Triumph, a Vitesse. This was an early Jilly Cooper, an old-fashioned rip-roarer that thought itself a classic but actually had more holes than a fishing net.

There were three BMWs, each a 3 series coupe. A Robert Ludlum, a Len Deighton and a John Grisham, each doing everything you'd expect it to do in a solid, powerful way, never winning a Nobel prize for literature but enjoying wide acclaim and deserved popularity.

I should also mention That Mercedes. A car that evoked on first sight the same feeling that I'd had as an eleven year old about to embark on Lord of the Rings, namely 'my God, that's long.' A little over five metres long, to be precise. I worked at the time for a reasonably well-known man whose passion was cars. He had a Porsche 911 Carrera 4. He had an Alfa. He had a Citroen. And one night he went to a car auction in Kensington and raised his hand one too many times at a 1977 Mercedes-Benz W116, otherwise known as the 450SEL. This behemoth boasted a 6.9 litre V8 engine, the largest that Mercedes had put in a post-war car. And this, he informed me, since he'd run out of parking space outside his elegant Notting Hill home, was to be my new company car. I remember saying something about petrol. I remember mentioning my salary. 'Oh don't worry,' he said cheerfully, 'you put in the first twenty quid a week and I'll pay the rest on expenses.' My weekly expenses claim increased by three figures. And this was 1993. As to its literary counterpart, Lord of the Rings remained true. To drive this car was to live a life of epic fantasy, a chance to adopt a new fantasy persona. Many of these began with 'P'. Like Pimp. Or Pusher. Or Panzer Division.

What else? I've had a Lexus iS200. That was the book that you pick up in the holiday hotel's reception, the one you've always wanted to read, and it doesn't let you down, it zips along using precise and artful prose, until it's the day before you fly home and you've only got ten pages left, and you discover that...someone's ripped out the last four. And you feel cheated, cheated beyond anything you can possibly imagine that this wonderful literary experience has come to such a disappointing end. The Lexus was a bit like that. A great car. And then you closed the boot lid and instead of 'thunk' it went 'ting' and you knew that underneath all the lovely engineering and the leather seats and the BMW-like handing was a Toyota.

The Lotus Elise was, with apologies to DBC Pierre, Ludmila's Broken English, a car that should never have been made, just as after Vernon God Little, DBCP should never have embarked on his tale of conjoined twins and east-European winters. Sure, it had some purple prose, just as the Lotus could occasionally feel like a real contender, diving into bends like a Scalextric racer. But there were also moments when the glass to the window just slid down inside the door of its own volition. ('Oh yeah, they do that,' said the Lotus technician.) Or when you wanted to remove the soft top and found that you needed five arms, three hands and an Allen key. I prefer to think of Lotus as the Esprit that Bond drove in The Spy Who Loved Me, or as the car in which Graham Hill won the F1 title. Just as I prefer to think of DCB Pierre as the author of Vernon God Little. Not the other one. To potentially over-egg the point, having that car was like finding a first edition collector's copy of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. It was mad, it was zany in its truest sense, it was exciting and then you discover that this particular edition is so collectable because its chapters have all been printed in the wrong order and the finished book makes, literally, no sense at all.

Two more to go, I think. The Saab 95 estate, a leather-lined, airconned, cruise-controlled comfort wagon, a John Irving book of a car, filled with familiar themes and luscious, relaxing prose that just makes you feel good. Of course, there are those that would point to Until I Find You and say that Mr Irving, too, reached a nadir. That'll be the chronic depreciation and the car's eventual explosive demise, then. But I liked Until I Find You and I still have a soft spot for the Saab.

And finally, the best saved until last. The James Ellroy, the David Peace, the wild-eyed, wide-scoped, scattergun poetic tour de force with extremely. Short. Sentences. The year was 1990, the year Car Magazine declared this particular motor as The Car Of The Decade. Peugeot were winning world rally championships. Its TV ads were eagerly-anticipated events. And for a year I had the best car I've ever had. The Peugeot 205 GTi. In white. Not the 1.6 litre one with the ugly vegetable strainer wheels, but the 1.9, whose alloys were works of art and whose package of engine and handling evoked gunfire and confidence in equal measure. Like an Ellroy trilogy that engages your intellect as much as your passion and leaves your breath less and your admiration unbounded, this was the crack cocaine of the motoring world, a car you couldn't stay away from, a car you woke in the middle of the night for just to drive on deserted roads. There's a rumour that Ellroy may yet release a fourth part to what is, for now, his American Tabloid three-parter. If he does so, I'm in. So take heed, Peugeot. Make something like this again and I'll sell my soul on a dark street corner to a man peddling used Dan Brown's if I have to. I'll even have my main character drive one of your ugly people carriers in lieu of a deposit.