I saw this insane thing round the corner from our house the other day – a gold Jaguar E-Type with whitewall tires, ffs – and was beset with a torrent of the compound emotions that seem to be par for the course in my dotage.
First of all, I was instantly a kid again, because it just looked like (and in many ways arguably is) a big toy. Secondly, the aesthetic voluptuary that sits on my shoulder had a little swoon. If engineering can be beautiful, here’s Exhibit A.
But then it starts getting complicated. I tried to imagine myself owning it and couldn’t. There’s an entire world of financial and practical reasons to make that concept a non-starter even before we get into the meat of it, but at my age – and in *this* age – I’d also be hit by such a blizzard of self-doubt and self-recrimination that I wouldn’t even be able to see through the windscreen. An emblem of fossil-fuelled superindulgence, driven by a fossil? No, thanks for all our sakes.
I also appear to have started following a number of model-railway accounts on Instagram, which is as sure a signifier of old age as it gets. I know the common rationale well – daft old sods like me are attracted to model railways because they represent a world they can control – but I couldn’t care less about control.
For me, it’s all about the smallness, the unthreatening evidence of painstaking care, the retreat from harshness. And if I can look at a gold Jaguar E-Type with whitewall tires in the same distanced, non-nuanced way, as a pretty object, that’ll do just fine.
I’ve just bought a 2008 Ford Fiesta, which I fervently hope will be as functional and boring as all the evidence suggests.
