Time! It really does slice past like a celestial crossbow bolt, doesn't it?'
And few things mark the blurring of the years better than children, dogs, and cars. Especially cars if you write about them – which we'll get to in just a minute.
Now I have no kids. Most of my friends do though. That some of those children are now at university prompts exclamations of, “Eeeh, it seems just the other day that little Jimmy/Jemima was brought home pink and new from the hospital.”
But I do have dogs. My current two, Milo and Daisy, are little mongrel rescues. Daisy's now touching 15, and is frosty and slow, far past leaping onto my bed, yet content all the same.
Even the younger Milo now needs doggy steps to get onto the bed. Yet it seems just the other week, maybe month, it really does, that they were both tiny balls of shoe-chewing, floor-weeing fur.
This business of our dogs living such short little lives is awful – although I'm pretty sure that we all ultimately get to link up on the other side. And I often look at Daisy and Milo and think, jeepers, they don't own stuff like smartphones or even shoes. Yet they're so very happy.
Then there are cars. And bikes.
Rummaging and rooting through boxes in storage I just yesterday happened on old press clippings, and realised with a disbelieving little jolt that almost three decades have blurred by since I wrote my first road report.
The steed? A black BMW K75 S bike. And check my deathless prose!
BMW K75S - Image courtesy Wikipedia
“The BMW looked like something that Darth Vader of Star Wars fame might have selected for personal transport.”
In my defence I had only just turned 20, circa early 1990.
And that was written for the The Leader – a fiery left-wing, black-owned newspaper on whose staff I was at the time, making me the only white face in the newsroom.
But the sheer wonder, the jubilation of those years, the kindness with which this white middle-class kid was treated. The covering of endless marches and political intrigue. The mixing and mingling with ANC members, some just off Robben Island. Including one bull of a man who took me under his wing and told me it was a good thing indeed that I was declining to do national service before, in lovely irony, later going on to be Minister of Defence.
It's all so crisp in recall.
As is that K75 S and its “three-quarters-of-a-litre of fuel-injected fury.”
Ouch.
But it was only with a later move to the dearly departed Scope magazine that I started dabbling in car writing, this clippings-trawl reminds me.
Aged 23 I hooked my first test car. A 1992 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am Convertible courtesy of a dealer in American metal.
Scope gave the Pontiac story six pages, and the porno Pontiac gave me a week of wind-blown, fuel-sucking ecstasy. Over a quarter of a century later I can still smell that car. Like it was last week.
1992 Pontiac Firebird Trans Am Convertible - Image courtesy Wikipedia
Its biscuit-coloured interior had that caramel scent exclusive to American-made General Motors cars of the '90s (a bit later I had a new Corvette that smelt just the same).
“Nothing exceeds like excess,” roared my exuberant article, prattling on about how the Firebird's “burbling” V8 was “capable of hurtling the car from standstill to 100km/h in around seven seconds.”
Hurtling indeed.
Around here I also started getting invited on car launches. Although auto writing for Scope was only a nice add-on to a job that included general feature churning, and inventing cerebral quotes to go with the star-censored pics of our “Glamour Girls.”
One of the very first allowed me to bring a partner. That was the Jetta VR6 launch at the Lost City. Great was my disbelief that I was actually getting paid to eat and drink as much as I wanted, stay in a five-star spot, and drive a quick car. I even got a present I think.
And, yes, I can recall the solidity and hide-smell of that Jetta. Vividly. Just as I can recall some of the other machines that came my way at Scope in those next few months.
Among them a Honda CBX 750P. The “P” stood for police, and was part of a shipment destined for Botswana cops. For a week I revelled in this bike with its fitted blue lights, its sirens.
Honda CBX 750P - Image courtesy Wikipedia
And now as I sit on a grey day in late 2018 writing this, being young and electric and pretending to be Ponch (Erik Estrada) out of ChiPs seems so fresh it could be last week.
Not 25 years ago – with the next 25 promising to go yet faster than a fuel gauge moving to zero.
Time indeed. So ephemeral.
Or as the saying goes: “Time flies like fruit, fruit flies like bananas.”