6. The BMW 520i SE (1990)

Description

A variation of an old Woody Allen joke was quoted to me by one of my mates who had previously congratulated me on the career move and the new company car.
“Bloody hell son, have you thought enough about this, I mean would you honestly want to work for a company that was stupid or desperate enough to offer you a BMW 5 series?”
The thought had crossed my mind, but fortunately my ego crushed it dead.
Now, at this point, I was twenty-nine years old. I was picking up, from BMW Hampshire Cars in Odiham, a brand new BMW 520i SE (E34 manufacturers designation) in metallic sterling silver. My parents thought that I was in the narcotics business or at the very least into financial fraud. I was still pinching myself considering that I’d now leapfrogged my mates with their lowly 3 series cars into the executive class of motoring. Of course, pride comes before a fall, but let’s just enjoy the moment together for a little longer, shall we?

The BMW salesman was an amiable fellow named Adrian who must have sensed me hopping about excitedly, but he remained professional throughout. A week before I was due to pick the car up, he drove me out to a lonely hidden field behind the brow of a hill on a farm track close to RAF Odiham. This was where Hampshire Cars kept their cars, safe and away from prying eyes. My car was in its rightful place in the middle of a neat row of BMWs surrounded by another hundred or so other, soon to be enjoyed, BMW 3 and 5 series cars. It was covered with wax and had chalk numbers scribbled on the windscreen awaiting its pre-customer inspection and makeover.

I was in love, there was no other word for it.
A week later, I was sitting in it, as giddy as a schoolboy with a frog in his pocket, with the engine ticking over as Adrian took me through the instructions for everything – and I mean everything. I wanted him to concentrate on the Blaupunkt stereo with eight speakers around the car, but he had his procedures to follow and, by God, he was going to follow them. Whilst he was wading through his mandatory verbals about the two litre, 120 bhp, 12 valves per cylinder, straight-six fuel injected engines giving optimal weight distribution and better stability, I was staring at the BMW roundel. This is also called the BMW propeller in the blue and white of Bavaria (incidentally, the Wednesday play in blue and white – good omen). I wonder if there was one on the joystick of the Focke-Wulf 190 which was powered famously by BMW and caused our boys a bit of a problem until the Spitfire Mk IX was introduced and later by the P51 Mustang and Hawker Typhoons. Clearly, my mind was wandering, I hardly heard a word he said, I just willed it to be over soon so I could be off on my own with her, but until then I continued to stare at the roundel entranced in a soporific moment that no narcotic could come close to eclipsing, a moment of pride, disbelief and a sensation that inferred that I had arrived. I was the owner of a 5 series.
Jesus.
The interior was well designed wrapping itself around the driver. The SE (special equipment) edition meant that the car came with many desirable features such as electric mirrors, electric windows all round, seats that moved in all directions, central locking, trip computer, burglar alarms, electric sunshine roof, alloy wire wheels, independent heating controls for each passenger and illuminated mirrors et cetera et cetera. Considering that BMW and Mercedes had a reputation, at the time, for being a bit frugal with the optional extras they offered, this particular car had plenty to gloat over. It also had an engine management system – a computer in the engine that lodged information from sensors. This could be interrogated by service engineers who would plug the system into their personal computers and this would help them diagnose problems before that manifested themselves. This did give you peace of mind, but it also had a dark side. It told you by successive stream of bright indicator lights just how long until your next service was due. This was a real pain because the lights could only be reset by the service engineers. After the service, everything would be perfect and then, all too quickly, the first light would illuminate. It wasn’t a big thing, but that little light would always catch your eye – as though something wasn’t quite right, wasn’t quite perfect and it should’ve been with BMW, shouldn’t it? From this point onwards, electronics started to become more critical in cars. It marked the beginning of the end for the gentleman engineer at home who would tinker with the engine and also for the independent garage who were not allowed to tinker with the engine management systems.

On the safety side, it had air-bags (a first for me), ABS and traction control (a first as well). In essence, I would have had to have been a real idiot to loose control of this baby! I had no intention of being any sort of idiot, I was no longer the boy-racer, I was the gentlemen sales executive who would, from now on, adopt a more dignified approach to life and this would be exemplified by the car I drove and the way I drove it. That was only half the story. This car had come at exactly the right time because, in the parlance of the times, my wife and I were expecting our first child.
Family man to be, executive car, good job – what could possibly go wrong?
Of course, there were plenty of naysayers who told me in rather pompous terms that it was well known in petrol-head circles that the 520i was underpowered for such a large and heavy car, but I must say that I never noticed this and it didn’t play on my mind especially since all the particularly naysayers were driving around in inferior Fords or Cavalier. It was a bit like the bloke in the office who knew 365 different love making positions but unfortunately hadn’t quite been able to hook up with a girlfriend as yet!
Wankers.
I think that the power was fine especially since my last experience in a rear-wheel drive BMW had taught me to be very respectful and so I was and she behaved wonderfully. Also, of course, a lot of the time my wife would be with me and we would be both paranoid about the baby’s well-being.
I was able to pick the car up on the Friday prior to starting the new company on the Monday, so I had amble opportunity to get comfortable in it, understand its foibles and develop a smooth driving style. That weekend, I visited everyone I knew to show it off. I remember being stunned that by Monday morning I’d already exceeded 500 miles. In those days, new cars had to be run-in and taken back to the garage for their first service just to make sure that everything was OK. During this run-in period, you were supposed to keep the revs low and not go anywhere near the red-line. Luckily, for me the 1500 mile run-in period was over in a week as I powered back and forth to Cambridge every day – 240 miles a day, five days a week.
Crazy.
Also, the company had given me a mobile phone with a proper in-car installation as well. This was a real novelty and enabled me to keep my wife informed of progress on the long motorway journeys home. I was also able to keep up with mates all the time. What was a novelty and something of a real perk which would soon become commonplace, but for a few years it was part of the image of success that people like me were desperate to foster. In selling, you are only ever as good as your last sale and sometimes when deals didn’t work out, you were on your uppers and you were on a bit of a losing streak it was important to maintain an air of success and confidence that the next win might be just over the horizon. The car and mobile phone certainly helped.
My wife drove all my company cars, but this was different, she really liked this one. It was the first car I’d had that had power assisted steering and this shouldn’t be underestimated. Previous to this feature, driving was a tiring thing to do, after power assisted steering, driving was easy! It was quick but felt safe, it was smooth and responsive without ever feeling wanton and she felt securely housed in its solid Germanic steel casing.

It never occurred to me that some elements at the new company would not be as enthusiastic about my car choice as I was, but it became very clear to me almost immediately that my arrival together with the BMW had ruffled more than a few feathers.
I had joined the new company in December just in time to be invited to the company Christmas do in deepest darkest Cambridgeshire. My wife was heavily pregnant at the time but wanted to attend with me. It was important to go given I was the new boy. So we settled into a small hotel in Duxford and freshened up for the Christmas party. It wasn’t easy to find, the countryside around Cambridge is very flat and on a dark December night driving around on narrow country roads set a metre above the beet fields doesn’t give you much perspective in the darkness and the absence of hills with lights of cottages and villages on them leaves the impression of a seamless undefined dark band all around your particular wilderness. There was no satellite navigation in those days just a map and instructions from the company. Eventually, in a clearing in a field was an ancient tithe barn surrounded by about a hundred cars. We followed the balloons and the lights until we arrived in the car park. I should have been alerted by the fact that the cars were all a pretty ropey collection of sierras and cavaliers, but I was more concerned by finding a parking space that would allow us to make an early and easy exit should my wife feel tired.
I had already met my work colleagues, but had only known them for a couple of weeks and I was looking forward to meeting them and their partners out of work in a social environment. The food was being cooked on hot coals in wire cube baskets, there were suckling pigs and massive joints of meat. It was more medieval kitchen and less Delia Smith, only the chained mastiffs chewing bones in the corner were missing. In the main part of the barn there was a stage at the back with a band, a dance floor and close to the entrance were circular tables laid out for the meal. After a few beers my new colleagues opened up. They were pissed off, they felt that they’d been overlooked for promotion and were being sidelined for lesser roles as a new contingent of employees had arrived with big salaries and big cars that were way beyond anything that they could have ever imagined. It was clear that I would have to embark on a charm offensive to placate them and that that would have to start right now.
Of course, there’s two sides to every story and the unfortunate truth was that the existing team did not have the experience or track record to give the management any confidence in their ability to take the company to the next step of their growth development plan. The company was falling backwards in their chosen market sector, that’s to say that their competitors were increasing their market share by closing new business faster whilst my new company were falling behind. Something had to be done about it and giving salary increases and fancy big BMWs to the team that were responsible for falling behind was not the answer. Consequently, the new company had decided to make an investment and I was the first demonstrable symbol of that investment, but I was quickly followed by a whole new outsourcing sales team.

I must admit that if the existing sales team were pissed off by my arrival then they hadn’t seen anything yet because the next wave of recruitment included some really heavyweight sales managers and sales directors and these guys couldn’t give a monkey’s wotsit about how the incumbents felt about their salaries or the cars they drove. Even I was a little embarrassed by the way the car park was beginning to shape up. Within a month, the two BMWs, that’s mine and then there was another sales person who joined just after me who had been inspired to get one as well, had been joined by a 4 litre British Racing Green Jaguar XJS and a silver Mercedes 500SL. In addition, there were rumours of yet more experienced players arriving with their exotic accompanying motors. We were really setting ourselves up and doing it in sparkly neon lights a hundred feet high.
Meanwhile I set about doing my job as best I could, by this time I was back on the road and wasn’t doing the journey to Cambridge any more. Recent announcements had indicated that as the new breed of sales management began to take control, the sales office would be moving to Wimbledon reflecting the fact that all of us lived in the southern home counties and that suited me just fine. It was also felt that customers would find the Wimbledon office more presentable and it had better facilities for customer presentations, also since most corporations had London offices it was easier to get to Wimbledon.
In the April, my wife gave birth to our son and I had the pleasure of being the proud father able to pick mother and child up from the hospital in the BMW.
A week or two later, there was more momentous news. I’d been unable to accept a ticket to the League Cup Final due to the recent arrival of our son, but fortunately it was on the television. Sheffield Wednesday were playing Manchester United. So, my team, who were in the second division, played Manchester United from a division above us, and we only went and bloody beat them, didn’t we? The first trophy for Wednesday since 1935, what a day 21st April 1991. Wednesday were on a roll and this victory propelled the team to promotion, so that the following season they played in the inaugural Premier League. This would be the start of a few glory years for the team culminating in two cup final appearances at Wembley in 1993 and Wednesday playing in the UEFA Cup when they famously destroyed Spora Luxembourg 8-2 on aggregate. The mighty Wednesday went to Wembley no less than five times from 1991 to 1993.
I felt on top of the world, but there were grey clouds on the immediate horizon.

Although the stereo was of a much higher quality than those in any other previous company car I’d had, it was still fundamentally a radio cassette. There was still much taping of CDs onto quality tapes to be done. Although, CD players had started to be produced for cars this technology was still in its infancy and they were being sold in cars as optional extras that did not justify the 1000 pound price tags in my opinion. The album I remember playing over and over during these hectic days was XTC’s Oranges and Lemons. The pop wizards had re-established themselves as with their previous album Skylarking which had ended a hiatus since their best album up to that time, the excellent English Settlement. Cognoscenti will cry foul over the omission of Mummer and The Big Express. These albums are good, granted but neither could hold a candle to English Settlement, Skylarking or Oranges and Lemons. After Skylarking, there was a couple of years gap to Oranges and Lemons which is essentially a very sophisticated pop album blending Andy Partridge’s gift for writing bouncy pop songs with thought provoking lyrics and being able to tap into a riff that seems instantly familiar but that you’ve never actually heard before. This blended with an edgy instrumentation and a desire to cover subject matters that no-one else would even dream of covering, such as Colin Moulding’s self-deprecating ‘One of the Millions’ and Andy Partridge’s ‘Pink Thing’, decorum prevents me from explaining that one! Every track bristles with bolshie certainty of the band’s intention that they deserve to be heard and they are undoubtedly the very best band in the world. Unfortunately, the majority of the record buying public hasn’t clocked this yet. The stand out tracks for me on Oranges and Lemons are ‘The Loving’ which sounds like a homage to Mott the Hoople and the quintessentially English morality tale ‘The Mayor Simpleton’ which, to my mind, comes out of the same box as another XTC song and surely one of the finest English songs ever written: ‘Love on a Farmboy’s Wages’ on the previously defamed Mummer. It should be added that Dave Gregory’s guitar on ‘The Loving’ and ‘Scarecrow People’ is extraordinarily brilliant. Surely, XTC are the greatest band ever to hail from Swindon. I have to hold my hand-up here, I love XTC. The band inspire that kind of devotion from a small but very loyal audience. Together with Steely Dan, they are the only band that I’ve purchased everything they’ve ever recorded including those songs by their alter-ego’s The Dukes of Stratosphear and Terry and the Lovemen. There is a musical connection to my mind in the closing track of the album ‘Chalkhills and Children’ to the English Settlement album with its famous White Horse of Uffingham album cover. Play this track with the windows down as you cut from the M4 to the A4 across the Marlborough Downs on a summer’s day with a deep blue sky, skylarks singing and the odd white fluffy cumulus scattered at random across the wide sky.
Other notable albums around this time were George Michael’s Listen Without Prejudice, Nirvana’s Nevermind and REM’s Out Of Time. ‘Smells like Teen Spirit’ still sounds as fresh and as anarchic as it did then. Listen Without Prejudice is by far the best George Michael album in my opinion although many critics prefer to judge by sales rather than by listening. Out of Time will still be played long after I’m pushing up the daisies. These albums formed key elements of the soundtrack for that the year that started so well with the birth of our son and the Wednesday victory over United, but then got increasingly and uncomfortably very difficult. The music helped to ease the pressure and reduce the stress of driving around the country trying to close customer contracts against increasingly looming targets and feeling that time was against me. Time was the one quantity that wasn’t negotiable.

The prospective customers weren’t quite as enthusiastic about the company’s credibility as a provider of outsourcing services as I was and the pressure to succeed was mounting fast especially with the cost of the new sales force being so visible in the car park. That summer I deferred my holiday in order to work relentlessly to build a pipeline of business as quickly as possible, everything was focussed on that first signed up customer. My team was putting out proposal after proposal whilst I was having meeting after meeting across the country and coming into the office after hours to work on the Executive Summaries for the countless pursuits we were involved with. And whilst the pressure was on at work, my wife was up all day and all of the night to look after our son. It was a difficult time for everyone and it was clear that something would have to give.
The car was performing impeccably but in my commitment to be successful I’d progressed from the nonchalant sheer bravado of ownership to a rather laissez-faire attitude bordering on taking her for granted. It was a beautiful, majestic executive cruiser but it became a super-reliable workhorse that could get me quickly and efficiently from one meeting to the next and then back to Wimbledon to connect to the support team.
In mid October, on a Friday afternoon, I was coming back from a customer in Bristol when my boss contacted me on the phone, as we used to do every Friday for a progress update. He asked if I’d fancy a beer in Winnersh. He was coming back from Birmingham. I met him at about five o’clock in a shitty pub in the Winnersh Triangle on a rainy dark autumnal afternoon. When I arrived his Jaguar was already parked up and I slotted the BMW in next to it.
There was something a little forced about his demeanour as he insisted that he buy me a pint, two minutes later I found out why. He had been chosen as the deliverer of the bad news to me, having seen some of my colleagues earlier that day. The company had decided to cut its loses and make us all redundant in one big bang coup on a miserable Friday night. The big effort was over and we had failed. I should have realised from the off that nothing good ever comes from meetings in those infamous get-together pubs that encircled the M25. Everyone in sales used them for serendipitous poaching meetings with recruitment agents or for letting people go apparently. So if anyone invites you to a late afternoon, end of the week, drink in the Runnymede Hotel at Egham, or the Otter at Ottershaw or the Royal Standard at Forty Green: just say no!
And get on the phone to your friendly recruitment consultancy asap.
That night I drove back home in a daze. As I came up the M4 slip-road at Junction 11 to get on the A33 to Basingstoke I contacted my wife on the car phone only to burst into tears as I tried to explain to her what had just happened. I was thirty years old, I had a six month old son, I had a big mortgage with interest rates at their highest levels for years and I didn’t have a job. The winter was coming, Christmas was approaching and I didn’t have a job.
The sobering reality of being unemployed left me with a feeling of disentitlement, disenfranchisement and overbearing uselessness.

Oh shit. No, that doesn’t really cut it does it? Oh shitty death! Yes, that’s much more like it.
Possibly the worst day of my life was handing back the car to one of the old original team who now worked at Wimbledon who couldn’t quite resist the opportunity to offer a smug smile.

SUMMARY (8/10): The last sentence says it all, this car takes up a disproportional amount of memory in my brain than the 10 months of ownership should really afford it. It was a milestone moment, and to continue the metaphors, it was a totem of success amongst family and friends in those crazy competitive days. If I’d have lived with it for the full course of the lease, say 3 years, I dare say that I’d have become bored with tank-like qualities of its design and handling, but I never got anywhere near the bored stage and so it remains locked in my memory as an important step towards the executive’s washroom. Or in my case, it represented overweening pride before a fall and a major diversion away from the executive’s washroom. It gave me a status that I probably didn’t ever deserve…it’s good to feel good about yourself and this car made that happen for me, at least for a short time. I only hope that its next owner appreciated it as much as I did.

Well, as an old friend used to say to me: ‘better to have loved than lost, than never to have loved at all!’

Next time, it’s more Renaults (1992).