Why Soul Machine?

It has been a long time coming and now, with a little bit of persuasion from those who've been kicking me, here it is in its somewhat wobbly initial state. What's it all about, and how did I end up here? Well....

As a lad, ten was an age when I had a lot going on. One moment I might be turning my bicycle into a motorbike with the help of a strip of ice cream carton lid and a close-peg, another I was making jumps out of old doors, pulling wheelies, building dams in the stream nearby, or playing Top Trumps with my brothers.

But passions can require a little more stimulus at times. We had The Professionals - Bodie and Doyle with fast Fords; that helped.

Top Trumps. Somehow that simple combination of easy-to-learn facts, evocative images, and gamification turned a whole collection of us into future automotive nerds. I can still so clearly remember the cars featured: 365BB, Alpine A110, Carrera RS, LP400...Chuck a bucket of cold water over me.

But passions can require a little more stimulus at times. We had The Professionals - Bodie and Doyle with fast Fords; that helped. A school friend telling me that he had been in an E-type and that it could do 150mph. Scalextric! Little by little my childhood was exposed and the car thing gradually sunk in.

Top Trumps To The Real World

When this stuff starts to become real then dreams are formed. The first time I saw a 930 Turbo everything suddenly distilled into a great dollop of incredulation..if such a word exists. We were on holiday in France in our 'baby-poo-green' Renault 12 estate, stuffed to the gunnels with kids and clobber; sail boat upturned on the roof. My dad pulled across from the inside lane to let a pale brown 930 Turbo, coming down the slip road, into the lane. Naturally he assumed he'd sail past it before pulling back in again, but at that same moment the 930 climbed out of my Top Trumps world and landed sharply into reality. It buggered off so fast that even my mild-mannered, local doctor of a dad, couldn't stop the swear word his brain produced from flying out of his gob. At that precise moment I decided that one day I would drive a 930 Turbo. One day perhaps.

Since my childhood I've had a thing about cars. When I was 21 I managed to save enough to buy a Renault 5 Gordini; I crashed it. I then restored a '72 MGB GT, which took two years on and off. I crashed it, with the filled-out insurance valuation documentation on the back seat waiting to be posted. It was written off.

I remember a professional motorcycle racer buddy of mine telling me that if you're not crashing you're not trying. I gave it my best shot back then; a period during which I was determined to understand how cars handled; and I was certainly not the only one. Cars were social moments. We didn't have Facebook or computer games; we went outside for our entertainment and met up. Cars and motorbikes.

But today we do have Facebook, and Instagram, YouTube, and the web. And thanks to a succession of further random events that for some reason I managed to blunder my way through without being found out, I had a successful company, which to a degree allowed me to find my way to owning a few lovely old wagons. So why this blog, and one day possible video channel?

As a lover of machines that stir the soul, I have a penchant for talking about them. I love it. But it happens very rarely in my day-to-day life. I live with five lovely ladies (including the dog), aged from two upwards, and they're not bothered. My friends at work don't really have an opinion. I have other friends who love an old-car chat but I rarely meet them, so I thought I'd see if I could find others to share some of this stuff with. And then there's the fact that I have some cars. We live in changing times. There's no certainty that we will be able to drive or ride our soul machines for much longer; despite hand-built old cars generating less in harmful emissions against time, from their production and use than a modern electric version (N.B. more on this in a separate entry soon), they risk being lumped into the general bucket of bad. As such, I want to document as much as I can and to help educate those interested, in the hope of contributing to the preservation of important historical items; and that very much means filming a collection of videos of my cars and those of a number of people I know who own lovely examples.

In the good old days. One of the many road trips; somewhere in France...

Selfishly, doing this allows me an excuse for using my cars much more. I'm expecting to be dreadful at it (especially the video bit) and it might all grind to a halt when the reviews flatten it and me; but looking around all the great content out there, I think I see an angle that could work, and trying to do this will hopefully be fun, and a nice distraction from a stressful working world.

We shall see....