Wheeler dealer
Jeremy Clarke
Sunday afternoon and my 14-year-old boy is over for the day. He's indoors on my computer, surfing the Net. Currently his favourite site is eBay, the Internet auction site. I'm in the garden, transplanting ancient blackcurrant bushes. They don't want to leave. The effort involved in pulling them from the ground has made me almost berserk. Out saunters my boy. He's got something to tell me. I can tell because he's looking at my face instead of at the ground like he normally does. I straighten my sunburnt back and wipe the sweat out of my eyes with the back of a hand. 'I've just bought a car on eBay,' he says.
He tells me the year of registration and the miles it's done and how many months are left on the MOT and so forth, then he tells me how much he's bid (f150). Interesting as these details are, however, the one piece of information that concerns me the most is, I suspect, being tactfully withheld. Nearly everything bought from an eBay auction can be posted from buyer to seller. Not so cars. They have to be collected. And who's going to have to go and collect this car? Father.
'So where is it, then?' I say. 'Newcastle,' says my boy, eyes to ground. No wonder its location came last. We live at the southern extremity of Devon. Between our house and northern France is nothing, apart from a small flock of ewes, but sea. And my boy goes and buys a £150 car from a man in Newcastle.
Apart from sarcastically asking why couldn't he find anything in Orkney or Shetland, I keep the lid on. If my boy sets his young heart on buying and selling motor cars, it is my duty, as I see it, to offer him every assistance. If it means spending a day travelling to the far end of the country and driving back again in something that might fall to pieces on the motorway and kill me, then so be it.
The rail fare from south Devon to Newcastle is £112. The coach is cheaper, but goes via London and takes 24 hours. So I hitch-hike. I haven't hitched for 20 years. What was it Mrs Thatcher was supposed to have said about people over 40 on buses? An indication of failure? What is hitching from Devon to Newcastle to pick up a £150 car a sign of, then? Insanity? But after a few sardonic thumbs-up from passing wise-guys I am too angry to be self-conscious about standing by the side of the road with a thumb out.
The garage mechanic who gives me a lift to the motorway demotivates me by telling me that at £150 the car is overpriced. The chatty young woman who picks me up next restores hope by telling me everything there is to know about her marriage and about the fetish parties she and her husband have started going to in an effort to revive it. She leads him around at these parties by a choke chain and he's only allowed to whine or woof. There were three small incredibly noisy boys on the back seat. Every so often, without taking her eyes off the road, she flails viciously at them with a stick she keeps on the dashboard. Several times I receive an accidental blow on the side of the head. In fact, I am the only one who sustains a direct hit.
In terms of distance travelled, the lift after that is the best of the day. A lorry driver takes me from just south of Birmingham to Sunderland. In terms of interesting conversation, however, it's easily the worst. He's got tables and stools in the back. Eighty-five tables, 113 stools. His boss buys up pub, restaurant and hotel furniture, restores it and sells it on. Before I climbed up into his cab, I'd never given pub tables and stools a thought — apart from whether they were occupied or not. But from just south of Birmingham all the way to Sunderland I get an extended lecture on the trade in second-hand catering furniture.
It's bigger business than you think. The mark-up on a refurbished pub stool, for example, can be quite remarkable. I made a mental note to alert my boy to the possibility, if he hasn't already noticed it, of becoming a pub-stool tycoon instead of a second-hand-car dealer. But when I finally press the doorbell of the address in Newcastle, the vendor sadly hands the keys to a little beauty of a car worth £750 of anyone's money. The boy done good.
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