I want to ‘convert’ from my old soft-top BMW to a gleaming Mini
Scrupulous honesty demands that I confess to owning a usable car. Please note that ‘usable’ is not the same as ‘perfectly good,’ because the latter it most definitely isn’t.
The usable car is a convertible BMW, and confessing the make and model establishes me as rich, having notions, and being discontented with something everybody else would be grateful for a sniff at. Got that off your chest, have you? Good. Then, we’ll proceed. This is a Beamer I have known and loved. This is a Beamer that, nine years ago, my husband brought home, having traded in my previous car without my knowledge or permission, he being the kind of guy who, if he decides to do you a favour, does you a favour with boots on. The great thing about a convertible is that you can have the roof down even at dawn on quite cold days, as long as you roll the windows up and have the heat on. The bad thing about a convertible, contrariwise, is that in a downpour it’s like being inside a drum with a manic tympanist beating on its outside.
The other bad thing about my car is that the system for raising and lowering the roof is so complicated that, half the time, I ended up saying ‘to hell with it’. For the first few years, nevertheless, the BMW and me were the best of pals. Kids in the street told me I had a cool car.
Male drivers checked me out, speedily losing interest when they copped that I was a hell of a lot older than they felt was fitting. That’s a characteristic of convertibles. They don’t just provoke envy, they provoke age-related condemnation. I overheard one conversation between bright young male things: they were all giving out that if you saw a decent convertible, these days, with the roof down, the driver was probably a fat ‘oulfla’. Took me a couple of minutes to work out this was short for ‘fat old fellow.’
Clearly, from the tone of the comment, fat oulflas should, by law, be restricted to driving black Ford Mondeos, or something similar. I didn’t earwig long enough to find out if they wanted to ban bothered oulwans from driving BMW convertibles.
I’ve never been unfaithful to the car, but, after a few years, the relationship went off the boil. You don’t want to spend a couple of hours every day with a touchy hypochondriac, and I don’t mean me. I mean the car.
It has this system, you see, for announcing when it’s not feeling the best. It puts its symptoms up in little icons on the dashboard in varying colours. ‘Yellow’ means it’s feeling a bit dawny. ‘Red’ means call an ambulance, or the AA. Son Number One knows a bit about cars, having spent most of what were supposed to be his student years in an unofficial apprenticeship in a garage, and so I got into the habit of ringing him up and describing the latest icon as it appeared on the dashboard. “It’s a letter A, inside a circle, and the circle ends in an arrow,” I would tell him. Or: “It’s like a cross-section of a tyre, with an exclamation mark in the middle.” His responses are always calm, more frequently dismissive. Once, when I protested that the Germans wouldn’t be putting icons on my dash without good reason, he did that long, noisy exhalation that bespeaks otentatious patience unjustified by the situation and then said. “Ma, if you’re planning to go racing on a glacier, that icon suggests you might wait until a mechanic has had a look at the car. If you’re not planning to drive on ice in the next few days, which, given that it’s August, would seem to be the case, you’re good to go.” At first, when I got the car seen to, I would have half a year before an icon re-surfaced, but the intervals shortened, so that it began to feel like the thing had developed hypochondria, with obsessive compulsive disorder on the side.
My negative feelings towards it were complicated by the fact that it didn’t have bumpers. I’ll concede that few cars have bumpers these days, but that’s a mistake. Or, rather, it’s a vile, exploitative feature designed to make money for the car manufacturers. When I learned to drive, using a stick-shift Mini, every car came with its own arm-bands, in the form of bumpers that stuck out at the points most likely to be bumped. They protected the main body of the car from the scrapes and dents delivered by over-active gate-posts. Some wicked person did away with bumpers, thereby ensuring that any scratch goes directly on a part of the car that is so integral to the totality that a) the scratch looks desperate and b) replacing the part costs several thousand euro. The front of my car, as a result, is just plain sad. The BMW, also, doesn’t have anywhere to safely put a cup of coffee or a mobile phone. And worst of all is its locking system. Two weeks ago, I locked the keys into the boot, like that man with the cute collie does in the TV ad, except I did it at five in the morning. That problem defeated the AA. Now, not much defeats the AA. The AA is your friend.
The AA man inserted wires, blew up balloons, did everything he could to open the car, before driving off in his yellow vehicle looking dejected. I rang BMW. Replacement keys, anybody? Oh, sure. No problem. I would just need to turn up at the garage clutching my ownership documentation, passport, visa, and a cert from the Gardai describing me of good character. (OK, maybe they didn’t need the visa and the police cert, but you get the idea.) If I did that and handed over a lot of money, they would get a key from Germany within a few days. WHAT? I paid a locksmith €150 to break into my own car, so I did, and that’s why I want a Mini.
Now, I quite appreciate that writing thus about my car reduces its re-sale value to less than zero, and simultaneously knocks on the head the chances of my getting a loan from my bank manager to buy a Mini, but never mind the logic, feel the passion. One of those domino Minis has my name on it. I just know it does.
My car is a convertible BMW, and confessing that establishes me as being rich and having notions
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