Well, inspired by C's tale on Sun Dried Sparrows and e.f.'s follow up comments, as well as by the hard work being done over at LSORO Again I'm going to come out.
In fact, better than that - I thought I'd show you some pictures of one of my loves. Actually two of them. I spent the afternoon with the camera out in the back alley getting them tastefully pushed up against the fence, stripped back, top off... That's right, now if you'd just show me some leather, perhaps let me get a shot of the sun glancing off your rear. Oh yeah baby, now you over there, let me see you with that leash...
OK, enough ! There might be children watching. You know what I'm talking about anyway, this just isn't that sort of blog !
Now much as I really honestly think of most things I own as just so much stuff, these two give me inordinate amounts of pleasure just from the sheer loveliness of looking at them, let alone using them. Which is just as well really since the board, which I must have had for twenty years, tends to travel with me but hardly ever gets used these days.
The car on the other hand is a relatively new possession but with a bit of a back story in my life. I bought my first racing green MG Midget when I was 19 - the raison d'etre was that I was getting fed up with my friends cadging lifts when all I wanted to do was be out with my then girlfriend. The answer, buy a two seater. It worked and even though me and the then girlfriend didn't last forever my love of the Midget did. Scroll forwards a few years and I'd moved down South, met the woman who I later married and we bought another racing green Midget, that lasted until the first of the Tins was on the way and the sad fact dawned on us that we couldn't carry three of us in it...so it had to go....at the 9 month stage.... Twenty years on and I'm solo again, I see this car in the local garage and just have to have it... you can call it a mid life crisis if you want to but I prefer the term enduring love.
When I got the car at 19 I thought it was an old model then. It was only two years older than this one...
But the course of true love never did run smooth and a few weeks on I'm driving down the motorway, top down, wind in what passes for my hair, 70 mph and a noise like a machine gun comes from under the bonnet. Towed into the garage. The fateful words "Big end gone mate". I don't even know what a big end is, but I knew it was expensive and potentially fatal.
I couldn't do it, we'd only just met. I took a deep breath, stroked her curved wings lovingly, looked into her headlamps and agreed to part with half as much again as I'd paid for her and get a new engine....
Now she's back - she purrs, she runs beautifully, she has a DAB radio ! So who cares what anyone thinks, we'll grow old disgracefully together, at least for as long as I can afford to. And maybe I'll get that board back in the water too now the autumn swells are coming in.
In fact, better than that - I thought I'd show you some pictures of one of my loves. Actually two of them. I spent the afternoon with the camera out in the back alley getting them tastefully pushed up against the fence, stripped back, top off... That's right, now if you'd just show me some leather, perhaps let me get a shot of the sun glancing off your rear. Oh yeah baby, now you over there, let me see you with that leash...
OK, enough ! There might be children watching. You know what I'm talking about anyway, this just isn't that sort of blog !
Now much as I really honestly think of most things I own as just so much stuff, these two give me inordinate amounts of pleasure just from the sheer loveliness of looking at them, let alone using them. Which is just as well really since the board, which I must have had for twenty years, tends to travel with me but hardly ever gets used these days.
The car on the other hand is a relatively new possession but with a bit of a back story in my life. I bought my first racing green MG Midget when I was 19 - the raison d'etre was that I was getting fed up with my friends cadging lifts when all I wanted to do was be out with my then girlfriend. The answer, buy a two seater. It worked and even though me and the then girlfriend didn't last forever my love of the Midget did. Scroll forwards a few years and I'd moved down South, met the woman who I later married and we bought another racing green Midget, that lasted until the first of the Tins was on the way and the sad fact dawned on us that we couldn't carry three of us in it...so it had to go....at the 9 month stage.... Twenty years on and I'm solo again, I see this car in the local garage and just have to have it... you can call it a mid life crisis if you want to but I prefer the term enduring love.
When I got the car at 19 I thought it was an old model then. It was only two years older than this one...
But the course of true love never did run smooth and a few weeks on I'm driving down the motorway, top down, wind in what passes for my hair, 70 mph and a noise like a machine gun comes from under the bonnet. Towed into the garage. The fateful words "Big end gone mate". I don't even know what a big end is, but I knew it was expensive and potentially fatal.
I couldn't do it, we'd only just met. I took a deep breath, stroked her curved wings lovingly, looked into her headlamps and agreed to part with half as much again as I'd paid for her and get a new engine....
Now she's back - she purrs, she runs beautifully, she has a DAB radio ! So who cares what anyone thinks, we'll grow old disgracefully together, at least for as long as I can afford to. And maybe I'll get that board back in the water too now the autumn swells are coming in.
I hope you like the pictures.
And despite all the tunes to choose from there was never much competition to this one that dates from around about the same time as the first MG - Does heaven wait, all heavenly, over the next horizon ?
