Or, Yes, I do drive a Vauxhall Corsa and I do have an enormous arsehole.
Like many communities around the globe, our wee home town’s early Friday and Saturday mornings are a-throb with the booming cry of adolescent car drivers’ chariots of choice. Vauxhall Corsa, Citroen Saxo, Renault Clio, even the odd (very odd) Fiat, each is kitted out with a great gaping hole of an exhaust – the go-faster-stripes of the new millenium.
Little hatchbacks in endless thundering convoy drive round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round and round the town’s three main streets to no obvious purpose other than disturbing the repose of old farts like me.
What’s particularly odd is the almost magical delusions that sports exhausts seem to engender in the hormone-rushed brains of the car’s teenage drivers. To most idle spectators it’s pretty obvious that the rather sad little hatchback before them is really just a pretty standard people box on wheels equipped with extra big arseholes – one at the back and one driving.
To the spotty driver, though, this simple and comparatively cheap addition to the combustion engine transforms their little family hatch into some kind of post-apocolyptic battle-wagon, and themselves into a great tattooed, hirsute, leather-clad, sweaty, road warrior, in comparison with which Mad Max looks positively dainty. A particularly odd delusion when, as happens so often these these days, it also infects girl racers as well as the boys. Hirsute and heroic isn’t really the new black, girls.
Fortunately, reality strikes, as it always does, within a few years. The battle-wagon remains the same, though now the scars and scrapes on the doors and wings are real rather than imagined. But a toddler has now appeared in the back seat, a ‘babe on board’ sign in the rear window, a cuddly toy on the dashboard, and a significant (m)other in the passenger seat. The driver too has changed. The truculence and posturing remain, but more in desperation than conviction. ‘Vin Diesel is a meringue to my breeze block’, they project, but then do as they are told, shut up, and get on with the shopping.
Ah well, there’s always next summer and the new generation of the hormonally challenged . . .
