What are your Happy memories? Can you give us a `sound bite` (literally that is) and a bit of a write up?
(Based on an 8yr olds memory of a `Desert Rat` friend.)
It`s 1955 and the crack troops that defeated Rommel in the western desert are again heading towards the coast - radiators boiling in old pre war cars, some with mastic oozing from cracked cast iron water jackets..
Kindly click the utube link below and let the music run in the background as you visualize the steady clop clop of these side valve metal donkeys creeping slowly in long lines towards the coast.
tinyurl.com/28fwrj
Kids peered into other cars as risky overtaking was the order of the day. "A Sunbeam coming alongside? no problem, it`s entitled to"
The shame of being in the old junk heap that has to stop halfway up Garrowby hill - boiling like a kettle.
Several hour later and most are at the coast - Fathers are sitting on the sand dressed it suits, sports jackets and ties - knotted handkerchiefs covering heads that had yet to show even a trace of grey.
For these were `safe` days. The bloke in the next little wooden holiday chalet was ex commando, another a desert rat - aircrew - you name it..
A coastal patrol bomber used to fly over at dawn and the Old Man was out of bed like a cat - before he even awoke..
You had to be careful about that - not to retrieve your beachball off the chest of the still sleeping deckchair bloke in case he had a war tuned `reaction`...
I knew in later years an ex Chindit who had to get his wife to lock him in a separate bedroom, for fear of a waking reaction..
Time moves on. There was a mature beech forest on Garrowby hill - with cars of this era pulling in steaming like an A4 Pacifics. Then suddenly it was gone - felled and lost taking the charismatic memory association with it.
Then a hardwood forest replaced it.. I bet that too is gone or going, much as the parents of the era and their friends - the entire `hard steel & knotted handkerchief generation` surely - almost too.
The landscape changes as does the veracity of memory.... soon in the merest flicker of geographical time our typing fingers will be stilled too. Eternity beckons..
So why not major on happy threads? Threads that uplift the human condition and that give a boost to being alive..
Now`s your chance - tell us about happy bank holiday motoring memories
Regards ;-)
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I think my happiest BH motoring memory is laying in the sun in the garden while the idiots, mimsers and 'only-drive-further-than-2-miles-from-home-twice-a-year' brigade do their best to annihilate themselves and everyone else...
Sorry :-P
Edited by mss1tw on 22/05/2009 at 22:24
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Always seemed to be scorching hot back in the sixties. Returning to th'Oxford after a day at the seaside, windows left cracked open in a vain attempt to keep the interior cool.
Scorched short-trousered legs on the leather upholstery. Father driving back shirtless, cussing if he rested his through the open window, forgetting about the hot metal
Happy days
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Queues on the Exeter bypass in dad's converted Austin 10 van (KPJ 505) circa 1957. Yes even then there were queues. In the hot weather every Vauxhall Wyvern we saw was boiling!
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tap tap (last tap) Any new "Happy Memories" then? Of this very weekend even ;-)
Maybe "happy" was the thread killer? "nasty" could now be an alternative as an attempt to keep the thread afloat.......
;-)
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sorry but as said im a stay at home bank holiday person as i too are sick of the wallies that drive to kill
i prefer to go on the weeks when they arent there
or better still go after they have gone and come back after they have gone
favourite seaside town?
scarborough,park on the south side (still free see),walk to the north side and back through the town, past the castle if you wish and then off to the famous sit down fish shop with tea bread and butter.
Then its off to staxton hill for a few hours to read the papers and let the world go by,and then a steady drive down through pocklington etc home
luvly---
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Los Angeles in 1973, the louche end of Hollywood, I went to the bank on a weekday and found it closed. Being paranoid in those days I immediately started worrying about the state of civilisation, or anyway capitalism: had it collapsed? Would I be eaten, or at least tortured to death for entertainment purposes, by gaunt hillbillies on the way back to New York? How would I get petrol, or come to that the firearms I might soon need?
Eventually I asked a passer-by (surprisingly few pedestrians as a rule, another sinister sign to a European) why the bank was closed. She (I think it was a woman) replied laconically: 'Fishing Holiday.' I gather it's the same thing as a bank holiday.
Anyway oilrag, that information made me feel, if not exactly happy, greatly relieved after my barmy fantasies...
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Sorry Oily, nothing to report, niether car has moved for 3 days, they seldom do on a bank hol, luckily we live in a quiet spot in the company of hundreds of wild birds.
I did however push the pick up's rear end over the retaining wall so i could rub down and paint the extremeties of the towbar whilst stood, much better for my worn out back which was showing the signs of 2 winters...the towbar that is, not my back which is showing the signs of far too many winters.
Should have done the wax-hoyling i suppose, but decided a long weekend making SWMBO feel even more loved and wanted was far more important..;)
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I remember with fondness, one bank holiday weekend in Tenerife where all the natives from "up north" would decend upon the sunny south.
We were sitting on some rocks watching the Gomera ferry depart and close by us were a family of Tenerifians and I mean Family - inc. G'dad G'ma & upteen Hijo's (children).
A member of the family, came over to us and gave us some of thier boiled Canarian potato's which were like nothing I've tasted since - such kindness!
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