Rainy Days and Memories

Remember when petrol was so cheap that you could take the family out at weekend just for the joy of a drive in the country? Recent governments seem intent on taxing things so much that we stop using them for pleasure. The only people left smoking are addicts and the only people driving do so for essentials only. In the search for alternative ways of raising revenue it's already been proposed that parking fines will punish you more than if you cause grievous bodily harm...

Anyway, in the last days of September 1981 I could still afford to use a bit of petrol for a family run out and so we found ourselves one rainy Sunday waiting for the ferry to take us over Lake Windermere to Hawkshead.

It was really pelting down, but that's a regular occurrence in the Lake District anyway so we were prepared. If you can see past the discomfort of heavy waterproof clothing and the odd trickle down the neck you can savour the muted colours and soft, soft lighting that comes from the grey sky and rolling clouds. So it was this day. We took the Ford Cortina up the narrow ways to Tarn Hows and found we had the car park almost to ourselves. That didn't happen all that often...

We got out for a short walk. Short because it really was uncomfortable in the pouring rain and whilst our coats were waterproof a soggy squelching soon made me realise that my shoes were just ordinary day wear and not the rugged hiking boots that may have kept my feet a bit dryer. A good pair of wellies may have made more sense, though then they always drip down from the top don't they?

So we stayed long enough to take a few photos and then got back in the car where our waterlogged clothing really started to make us feel uncomfortable...

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Family Transport 4 - Mostly Cortinas

The fourth entry in this series of car memories and first we'll deal with the only one in this entry that not only isn't a Ford, but isn't a Ford Cortina!

This is a Triumph 1300 and was bought in 1979. It was old (1968) and extremely battered. There was a dent in the roof as though it had been rolled at some time and the paintwork was marked and impossible to wash clean.

It was something of a gentleman's car though, with a walnut wooden dashboard and a refusal to change gear in a hurry. When it was giving signs of imminant death I sold it on through the local car auctions only for the police to come round a couple of weeks later... During the Conservative Party Conference in Blackpool, the new owner had abandoned it in the entrance of the Imperial Hotel - which was where Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher and her Cabinet Ministers were staying...

The new owner hadn't registered it and the police were playing catch-up from the last known owner which was me. At the time of IRA activity, the car was in considerable danger of being blown up by the army! The police officers did grin, but refused to give me a lift to the hotel so I could watch... In the end it wasn't blown up anyway

I had since bought this - a Ford Cortina Mk IV which was only 3 years old and the newest car I'd bought wholly with my own money. The Mark 4 was a relatively rare beast after a very short time. Distinguishable from the Mark 5 mainly because of the front and rear light clusters, they all seemed to disappear off the roads not long after the Mark 5 came out.

It was a bit of a disaster, this car. It had been used as a taxi and although it looked wonderful, we suspected it had gone "round the clock". Odometers at the time only had 5 digits and thus once they reached 100,000 miles they showed zero and started again. It was only recently that cars had been capable of travelling far enough to turn the clock over as the apparent resetting to zero was known. The engine started to smoke quite heavily, with no regard for it's own or any occupants' health! At the same time I was made redundant from work at a time when unemployment was a national issue (when is it not, I know...)

I remained without a car and a job for months that stretched into years. Although it didn't seem so at the time, this was the best thing that could have happened, as I used the time to learn computer programming on a Commodore64 home computer. I used that knowledge to write business software for the first college I worked for in 1985 and that shaped my career since that time and ongoing.

Whilst at that college, the Nautical College in Fleetwood, I bought this - an old Cortina Mark III which was absolutely wonderful. It had been tarted up with a two-tone respray using new Ford colours and was totally unique. It was 13 years old when I bought it and I had it for almost 4 years, being quite upset to lose it when it had an argument with the rear end of a lorry who slammed his anchors on hard for no reason other than to read a map, as I was overtaking the van behind him. Oncoming traffic meant I had to get in front of the van and I hadn't time to stop. The wings of the car were crumpled back over the wheels and I was lucky to walk away unscratched.

The car was a write-off. My friends, who had been in the habit of leaving notes under the windscreen wiper when they saw it parked anywhere, were as devastated as I was. It had been in immaculate condition. Even MOT testers drooled over it each year when I took it in. Whilst new parts were sometimes hard to come by due to its age, they were relatively easy (and cheap) to get from scrap yards! And it was fun doing that. I even bought an indicator stalk from a scrap yard in Norfolk after the steering column set on fire one day whilst on holiday in Great Yarmouth. Now why would that not be fun?!?

It follows that the next purchase was rather urgent and it was this: a Mark V Cortina, bought from a car dealer who turned out to be the father of a colleague. She was really worried we'd be disappointed but, given that I'd opened the boot on the test drive and found an empty can of paint thinners, I knew it had been tarted up and resprayed and in all fairness although it wasn't as exciting as the Mark III, it served us a couple of years which was as much as we could have expected.

In 1990 I had started a collection of pinball machines - as you do... The Ford Sierra Estate joined us, being 3 years old and again, strangely perhaps, this was a brilliant car to drive and own. We trundled pinball machines and jukeboxes about in it and it was our first car with the modern style of hubcap that hid all view of the wheel itself. Up until this time hubcaps just covered the central part of the wheel and the wheel nuts. So you see - there were two cars that weren't Cortinas...

Part 5 of this series will bring us up-to-date.

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Cornwall, Here We ... Came!

The old slides are still going through the scanner at Burke Towers. A 1989 holiday in Newquay is currently being done. I've mentioned Porth and Trevelgue Island before, but every time we go there I take photos that are variations on a theme! I'll try to cover places I didn't cover before though - or at least show photos from a different angle! It doesn't help that I'm working backwards through time...

Anyway, the day in question for this article is Saturday 5 August 1989. We were camping on Porth Beach Camping Site. There were much the same teams of combatants - Miss Frannny, myself and daughter Gill, Mum, Dad, brother Frank and his son John. We were in two rather battered old Fords. Mine is the quite nice looking Cortina, but the new paint job it had been given was covering a multitude of sins... Mum and Dad, Frank and "Young" John (what does that make me???) were in Dad's Granada that had just had a new (used) bonnet fitted to replace the sheet of rust that previously tried its best to keep rain off the engine. It had yet to be sprayed to match the rest of the car!

It was fairly early on in our camping days and we hadn't yet bought the large 3-bedroomed tent we were to eventually buy so the three of us were making do in this small tent on loan from Fran's brother, Bob. (Thank you Bob!)

It was a stonker of a day, gloriously sunny and very hot - were we really in England? We couldn't help noticing a slight whiff of petrol... No... wait... there was a horrible stench of petrol! I had filled the car up just before we got there. The garage had it stored well underground - perhaps in a refridgeration plant - and since being squirted into the car it was warming up nicely, expanding, and forcing its way out of the petrol cap in a potentially disastrous torrent. "I'm going to have to go for a drive to use enough petrol to stop it leaking!" So, as Miss Franny was unpacking stuff into the tent and not wanting to go for a ride in a waiting time bomb, off I went on my own.

I found an old Iron Age fort on the map and headed to Castle-an-Dinas to have a look. The car had to be left at the bottom of the hill and I walked up to the fort. There was a bungalow halfway up belonging to an English Heritage chap. A huge alsation and a goose both came at me, the goose being far more aggressive than the dog and I was pleased to get up to the top leaving the wildlife behind.

At some point I had to come down again... Having heard the commotion for a second time, a nice chap came out as the dog and goose went into furious overload and he grabbed hold of the dog, saying, "It's ok he doesn't bite..." whilst the goose broke both my legs with its wings and took a chunk of what I like to think of as my most precious part in its beak... Thank you! I called in high falsetto, hobbling down the hill as fast as I could, until the goose eventually gave up and stopped dangling from between my legs to drop to the ground and stalk back up the hill with a parting hiss that I took to mean "Let that be a lesson to you!"

Back at Porth I discover the rest of the family and families from the tents near us lying around unconscious from petrol fumes and wake the family to go for a coffee at a small cafe along the path towards Newquay. Here we are looking across to Trevelgue Island, which we have always called Porth Island, not knowing any better.

As always for our first evening in Newquay we'll be off to explore Trevelgue Island. Only an island at high tide it has earthwork defences that denote an Iron Age past and, well you know me... I love anything like that.

The sides of the island are not particularly high, but they are cliffs none-the-less and access onto the island is via a wooden bridge. At high tide the water flows energetically from one side to the other underneath and it gives the walk onto the island a little bit of added wonder and satisfaction. At either side of the bridge are earthwork banks, still impressively large. In fact on the island side the defensive wall has been cut to take a stepped path and you walk through with the top of the wall above your head. I never fail to be excited by it, whilst the rest of the family wait impatiently saying things like "It's just a hill!"

Anyway this holiday will include a few more stone circles and weird stuff! (Hooray!) And I'll finish this first article with another view of Porth Beach which is a long beach with a shallow fall off to the sea which makes for easy bathing although you should bear in mind always that this is the Atlantic and some large waves can come in. The flags on the beach show where it is safe to go into the sea.

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Dinky Cortina

I've almost given over buying magazines these days as there's so many interesting articles, blogs and so on to be found on the Internet.

However, browsing online at random without something in mind is a bit mind numbing and also burns time like nothing else. We were in WH Smiths this morning and I saw a toy collector's magazine and thought "why not?"

Sure enough there were a number of illustrations of cars and toys I have had and on seeing the photo of the Dinky model Ford Cortina, by lifting my head upwards to the shelf over my computer I found the actual article!

Mine (of course) is the one without a box and without a full covering of paint... The photo in the magazine showed a model issued in South Africa, which may account for the green colour instead of the blue. It had sold in 2006 for 2,230 UK pounds.

[cough!] [splutter!] Wow!!! Two and a quarter thousand pounds!!!

I should take more care of the few cars I have left from my childhood! The boxes were all thrown away as soon as they were opened for the first time and the car taken out so mine would never reach those lofty heights but even so...!

I took the Cortina from the shelf and gazed at it lovingly. I opened the doors - the first Dinky toy I remember with opening doors actually. The plastic dashboard and steering wheel fell out.

Lovingly I fitted it back where it had come from and it went back as good as gold, slipping into place as easily as it must have done for the original Dinky engineer. The seats were a bit dusty so I gave it a dusting....and broke the back of one of the tip-up seats... It's lying now on my desk in two parts and I'm looking at it and feeling more aggrieved than 5 minutes ago. That's knocked a good 2,229 pounds and 70 pence off the value...

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My Cortina RIP

Still sorting through several thousand old photographic negatives and came across this one.

This was my 1972 MkIII Ford Cortina, bought second-hand in 1985 for a mere £250 when I was working at my first college, the Nautical College in Fleetwood.

The photograph was taken shortly after I bought the car, which had been resprayed in these colours which were then current Ford colours. The colour scheme made the car unique and everyone who knew me would pip their horn and wave as we passed them.

We'd park it somewhere and come back to find notes under the windscreen saying "Hello John, missed you but found the car!"

It was one of the best cars I've ever had. Even MOT mechanics would drool over it whilst tapping the sills energetically to see if they caved in.

It was a trifle under-powered though as it was the 1300cc basic model and sadly this contributed to it being written off in a collision some three years later.

WFV 970K RIP