Recently, I've been painting my house.
That's probably enough to say in itself; if you knew how much I hate house maintenance, this statement would have sufficient impact to be the entire content of the column.
However, I do have something further to write.
I'm sprucing up the house because I am selling it - farewell Adelaide, hello Queensland. In fact it's all Donna Garlin's fault. I'd been in Queensland chatting with Donna - the wife of ChipTorque's Lachlan Riddel - and she had had the audacity to ask me why on earth I lived in Adelaide. That flummoxed me - why did I? I couldn't think of too many reasons, and so I decided to move. Sell the house, sell the EXA (the elephant gave it back), sell the Volvo and the junk from the shed, and drive the Audi a long way north-east.
Painting is enforced mental inactivity. Normally, I am sitting at my PC, mind working hard as I generate stories, edit others' text, proof issues and so on. There's not much time to be thinking of other things. But painting gutters is very different - once you've worked out the technique, your mind is free to wander. And it has been - wandering, that is. I've lived in this house for five years, and it's been a very automotive half-decade.
Within the first months of arrival, an old Falcon drove through the front wall. Yep, we're positioned opposite the long leg of a T-junction, and the Ford's throttle jammed open. A traditional worked-over street machine, I figure that his rear brakes were disconnected - good for burn-outs y'see. The front wheel skid marks went for over 100 metres. I wasn't home; instead (once I came within range) I received a slightly garbled phone call from my lady, Georgina. By the time I got back the excitement was over; the car had been extricated, the gushing water main blocked, and the leaves and debris swept away. Just a dented brick wall and a felled veranda post as evidence. Oh yes, and the wide black marks made by the car's rear wheels, as they still kept spinning while the front of the car was immovably wedged...
Then there have been my cars. The one that looms largest in my memory - a bitter-sweet memory at that - is the R32 Skyline GT-R. Back in the days when people really believed that the 100-odd Australian delivered cars would always hold their value much better than (what was then) a trickle of imports, I was prepared to pay an awful lot of money for a car that was in brand-new condition - only nominal kilometres on it. I thought I was getting a car that would prove immeasurably superior to my mildly tweaked Liberty RS; what I found I had was a car where the hype so far exceeded the reality that the disappointment was crushing.
Back then the engine was the best thing about the car - although today even it looks aged with its lack of sequential turbos, fixed valve timing and missing variable intake manifold. But still, a beautifully sweet, tractable and grunty engine, even if like all the other RB Nissan sixes, it drank far too much. And the rest of the car? Ludicrous in terms of its packaging, far too heavy, and with a handling and steering approach designed purely - I assume - for the track. Because on the road the power oversteer was unbelievable, the tramlining farcical. With my now-famous torque split control I revolutionized the handling, but even so it was a car that neither of us in this household loved. Not like we'd loved the Liberty, anyway.
We may have not been enamoured with the GT-R, but we cared for it like a new-born. Not once in the years I owned the car was it left overnight in the (locked) carport without another locked car being positioned behind it. Not once was it left in a carpark out of sight; it never went to a supermarket, to a shopping centre, on a country drive where it had to be left alone. I hadn't thought of any of that before I bought it - the RS used to scream down dirt roads, used to go on beaches, used to twist the road backwards at an indicated 252 km/h.
And any old road at that.
But within days of buying the GT-R, I had to get used to every dropkick on the road coming up for an attempted side-swipe closer look, every idiot yelling things at me through the (closed) glass. And I realised how other people would rather like to borrow it, or scratch and dent its alloy bonnet and front guards.... So it was always kept in sight.
As its value crashed (and incidentally, I'm pretty well on target with my predicted values for GT-Rs, which 18 months ago people laughed at), its weight around my neck increased. Rather than being bought through a loan, the GT-R was leased - and the residual was looking like being way higher than the Nissan would be worth at the end of the lease period. But what could I replace it with? This time I had very definite criteria; the 1993 Audi S4 satisfied them all. There were no tears at the departure of the GT-R, a far cry from the emotion in this house when we got it home that first exhilarating evening.
And other cars? The Daihatsu Mira turbo lived only a short time after we arrived here. Boasting enough mods to give it around 200 hp/litre, it used to get to 100 km/h in the high sixes; but I made the mistake of letting the oil level drop a little and then throwing it through a roundabout at a ballistic pace. The result? Shot crankshaft bearings. The poor red beast lived in the shed, a forlorn dusty shell, engine half in and half out. That was a far cry from passing others at 180 km/h on the open road, turbo screaming at twenty-something pounds, exhaust bellowing and gaping heads twisting as we rocketed past slower traffic. But the Daihatsu found a good home; it went to a young bloke intent on restoring it to at least some of its former glory.
And another project that gave joy - though was never fully completed - was my old C210 Skyline coupe. I fitted it with an RB20DET engine, 5-speed gearbox, water/air intercooler and R31 GTS front brakes - the exhaust and ECU mounting were never finished. It lived in the shed, then out of the shed, then in again, registration also coming and going in fits and starts. Then, when one day Georgina decided to have one too many traffic light drags and the engine died a noble death in combat, it was time that it vacated our possession. It went to Justin, a young man whom we had already met when he bought our Camira wagon.
Camira? Of our eight cars owned in the time in this house, that car stands proudly upstanding as one of our favourites. Bought specifically to allow hands-on experience tuning the GM-Delco management system with the brilliant Kalmaker software, the JE 2-litre achieved a 30 per cent power increase through exhaust, intake, cam and management changes. It had a cammy idle, very noisy exhaust, earlier model 14-inch alloy wheels, and - well, being a Camira and a wagon - it attracted not the slightest attention on the street. And if anyone did look at it, all their thoughts were negative... until it sprinted off into the distance. It wasn't the ultimate sleeper the Mira had been, but its torquey-but-revvy atmo power was nearly as much fun. It was Georgina's car, and she loved it.
But when a project is finished it's time to move on, and we bought a Nissan Pulsar EXA turbo to replace it. Intended to be a grand project car, I had lots of ideas for it. But when finances started to bite, it came down to this - pour some money into modifying the EXA, or pay the lease this month on the GT-R (and then later the Audi). The choice was clear. The EXA got a few mods - a boost control that came then went, a gauge pod that came then drooped in the hot sun, door speakers (but only on one side), then - finally - that famous elephantine exhaust.
Justin had bought our Camira and the old Skyline; I jokingly emailed him asking if he wanted to buy the EXA. He did!
And the other cars? I took as a trade-in on the Liberty a Mazda MX6 4WS; the Mazda remained untouched except for maintenance and proved itself a sweet, luxurious and refined car. However, it had to go at short notice to a car yard for a bargain cash price - a change of employment meant that I urgently needed to upgrade my camera gear. I later bought for $1000 a 1969 Volvo 142 2-door, simply because I wanted to experience an older car again (I had owned a Rover 2000 once and loved the perspective it gave me).
After five years, the vacant shed shows evidence only of a floor stained with engine oil. The front lawn is car-less but still moulded into strange hollows and mountains by the passage of all those tyres. Except for a fridge awaiting the removal truck, the carport that once one night saw a couple laughing aloud in sheer exultation at the arrival of a GT-R, is swept clean. The neighbours still scowl from nights of full-throttle around-the-block boost control testing, and we've recently found out just how much the house upkeep suffered while car maintenance never did - yes, it's been an interesting time...
