Notes from the Hard Shoulder by James May

Author:James May [James May]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780753520789
Publisher: Ebury Publishing

THE RANGE ROVER OF OUTSTANDING NATURAL BEAUTY

Today, from the window of my office, I have an uninterrupted view of my 1992 Range Rover Vogue SE. I think it may be the sort of thing WB Yeats had in mind when he wrote of 'All things uncomely and broken, all things worn out and old'.

In case you weren't reading two years ago, or you have since found something more interesting to contemplate, I should explain that the Rangey was bought in strict accordance with my principle that one's biff about car should not cost more than £1 per cc of engine displacement. Not the mintiest Range Rover in the world, then, and definitely not the most aromatic.

And I have never neglected a car quite like I have Old Stinker, which sits there looking positively doleful as I walk on by, averting my eyes from its cack-encrusted flanks and the pastie wrappers piled on the dash and visible through the windscreen. I'm beginning to believe that everything I have ever taken into the Range Rover is still in there, and that includes a bootful of old building materials that I was supposed to take to the dump several months ago. Trouble is, the Range Rover is the dump, and if I parked it with the windows open it would soon, like any other skip left around here, be full of my neighbours' garden rubbish.

This is most uncharacteristic. I carry a Hoover around in the Bentley, just in case, and I keep a small, stiff paintbrush in the Porsche for removing dust from those little crevices around the switches. When I drive the Boxster I adjust the air vents and heater controls not for my own comfort, but so that the overall arrangement is symmetrical. I also polish my shoes and wash up while I cook. I can't stand muck, filth and disorder, and yet I've somehow allowed the Range Rover to become completely feral.

One reason for this is that it offers a welcome opportunity to escape the rigours of modern urban life and roll about in my own ordure like Neanderthal man. This office is somewhat similar: an oasis of dirty cups, empty beer bottles, waste paper and general squalor in an otherwise spotless household, like a dog's egg in the middle of a croquet lawn. But there's a better reason for treating the Range Rover in a way that, if it were my cat, would land me in the clanger.

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

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