9. The Rover 800i (1994)

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The Rover 800i I took from the pool was not a better car than the Peugeot, it’s just that it wasn’t a diesel. Actually, today I wouldn’t have bothered because today’s diesel cars are a million years evolved from their dreadful ancestors back in the early 1990s but then it seemed to mean everything to me to save face with my friends and family and not to be the laughing stock in our social circle.

“Here comes Blakey from ‘On The Buses’”, they’d intimate as I pulled up in the Peugeot diesel.

I took possession of a white Rover 800i hatchback (or what Rover euphemistically called a fastback). It was a huge beast of a thing just like a beluga white stranded on a beach. It was an entry level executive car according to the blurb but it had very little gismos. Air-conditioning and CD player had been sacrificed to get away from the diesel. My memory tells me that it had electric windows and mirrors and that was about that. It had a sunshine roof too but I’m sure that it was manual. The stereo was poor quality but it had a tape so I was back to recording tapes again. For all that, it wasn’t too much of a hardship and for a little while I quite enjoyed lumbering along the motorways of Britain in this stalwart of Bomber Command. It had an advantage too, Her Majesty’s Constabularies used the same Rover cars as their motorway patrol cars and so when people looked in their rear-view mirrors and saw me bearing down at them, they got out of the way sharpish assuming I was a police car. This meant stress free journeys watching the fast lane clear before me rather than having to go up behind some moron in a baseball cap who felt it was their right to sit in the fast lane for fifty miles doing exactly seventy miles per hour even though there was no one in the middle lanes. This would invariably end up with me flashing my lights at them and getting stressed up and defaming the great unwashed for all the ills of Britain. I liked Richard Dawkins’ little witticism that people who wear baseball caps in cars have IQs 20 points less than the average driver and those who wear them back to front have IQs of 40 points less!

Note here that I’m quoting Richard Dawkins and I couldn’t possibly express an opinion on the matter!

You might think reading this that the Rover 800i was fast. It was not!

You would have been better off not with an advanced driving test but with a Day Skipper examination to drive the Rover. It lumbered, swayed from side to side, not unlike the Renault 25, as if to keep it going in a straight line you’d need to tack left and right, port and starboard, to make progress down the motorway. No, it was a pretty awful thing, but it was big and good grief could it carry a load. It was ideal for the new family with all the buggies, toys, cots, car-seats, special foods et cetera that became essential on our baggage train wherever we went. Packing for holidays, which I’d always found very stressful, shouting up to my wife and asking how many more bags she was expecting to take as four became five became six – but that was all a thing of the past. The Rover could take the kitchen sink and probably, the kitchen too. My wife was less than supportive of my need to keep to a minimum amount of baggage because I’d been the one responsible for having ‘stupid’ and ‘inappropriate’ cars for a growing family. This was of course aimed at the Clio 16v, but all that was behind us now and basically because the Rover’s fastback boot was cavernous whatever arrived in the hallway to be thrown into the car could be absorbed with ease. It was definitely a plus point.

It had a 2 litre engine that may have had 16 valves but all that stuff, horsepower, acceleration, alloy wheels, turning circles was irrelevant with the Rover. A different lexicon was required and, as I have eluded already, it had more to do with the sea than the road: stopping distances and gross tonnage. There were some moments of fun in the thing though and it was good to get back to the tapes so that I could ‘make tapes’ to reflect different moods you’d expect on long motorway journeys.

We were working well as a team, the job was going well and our first big contract had been won. There was an air of self-satisfaction amongst us all as we wandered around head office in Croydon or took new prospects around the new business centre we’re just acquired in the midlands. My team were doing well too and were being recognised for their key roles in the new acquisition. As I said before, the one who was driving around in my old Peugeot, and incidentally, he was extremely happy with it, had a particularly immature and naive taste in music. Unlike the other one, who had an excellent taste in music and shared a lot of likes and dislikes with me.

See what I did there, too?

We would spend many happy hours in cars discussing Little Feat or Steely Dan or the Mothers of Invention. He introduced me to the Black Crowes and the album ‘Amorica’. This music was an updated southern blues sound reminiscent of some early Little Feat crossed with early Led Zeppelin. The album had that raw almost live-take production with the odd rough edge to it which makes music sound real and alive, this was a million miles away from the over-produced soft-focus nonsense of Extreme. When I had the chance of running a pursuit in Atlanta, Georgia for a few weeks it was an easy choice who should go with me. After a hard day’s graft we’d settle into a booth in Ray’s on the River in Pace’s Ferry just outside Atlanta with an oversized burger and beer and listen to a local band covering the Allman Brothers or Lynyrd Skynyrd.

Fucking brilliant!

This was in stark contrast to some of the other music of the times that I was enjoying on my tinny tape cassettes such as Jeff Buckley’s excellent ‘Grace’ album that included the now famous cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’. Whenever I played that album I always had to play something by his father, Tim Buckley, usually the mesmeric track ‘Dolphins’. Both died far too young and I wonder where they would have taken their music if they hadn’t died so tragically.

The first Portishead album had been brought for me for my birthday and although it was not the sort of thing I’d have bought for myself I found that I loved it, especially ‘Glory Box’ which was slow, intense and builds a sense of suspense and apprehension like a scene from a 1940s film-noir and that matches in my mind to the little crackles and clicks that they leave in their music or maybe they add them in afterwards to create atmosphere.

 

One of the challenges in the Rover was its size, getting in and out of parking spaces or manoeuvring down country roads and having to do a U-turn because the local farmer could not reverse his combine were particularly enjoyable experiences, but the one I remember most was at home on the drive. My wife, her sister and her mother had been shopping and had all come back to our place for coffee. My wife’s sister and her mother parked on the drive one behind the other outside my wife’s garage. The cat had been rolling in the dust outside the other garage door, the one where I parked my car, so my wife had parked on the drive but far from the garage door. By the time, I got home my wife’s sister and her mother had gone home leaving my wife’s car stranded on the drive a car’s length from my garage. I thought about going in and getting my wife’s car keys and moving her car but then I couldn’t be bothered and besides I had a plan. I opened up my garage door and considered the angles. Could I get the whale around my wife’s car and get it to straighten up in the limited space to get her into my side of the garage. There were a few additional challenges, so let me describe the scene in more detail. If you looked from above you would have seen a double garage. The house was to the right of the garage. The left hand garage was mind. You could park four cars on our drive comfortably but my wife’s car was parked about a car’s length down from my left hand garage door. So if you can imagine looking from above at a chess board of four squares with the garage at the top of the squares then my wife was parked in the bottom left hand square. The challenge was: could I drive the whale coming in from the bottom right hand square cut across the top left hand square and straighten up in the space available to get into the garage? To add to the degree of difficulty there was a low wall on the left hand side of the chess board marking the boundary of our drive and the grass verge. There were two further challenges, firstly, the car only just fitted into the garage anyway and secondly, to distract you there were neighbours who could pop up at any moment to enjoy the spectacle. I looked about me, there was no one around so I went for it. The first thing I learnt was what looked like a car’s length between the garage door and my wife’s car wasn’t. I got out to see how close I was to the wall with the nose of the whale. I would have to get some of the nose into the garage with the tail still sticking out on the other side of the drive and see if a many-many point turn easing forward infinitesimally each time could get me in.

It could not.

I got stuck quite literally, my nose (the massive plastic bumper) was rubbing up against the wall just inside the garage, my driver’s door has hard up against the right hand wooden frame of the garage door and I couldn’t open up my door to get out to see how much tolerance I had – assuming I had any! As soon as I got stuck, the whole street came to life, there were neighbours out selling tickets and offering squash and biscuits on trestles-tables to passers-by and my wife had appeared on the doorstep shaking her head despairingly.

The news spread around our cul-de-sac like a wildfire.

“Oi, Jean. Come and see what that fucking idiot next door’s up to this time!”

Oh cock!

I had to crawl across the seats to the passenger side which would just open enough to let me squeeze out so that I could survey my predicament. I doubted very much I could retrace my metaphoric steps to get the car out and back to where I’d started – such had been the intricacies of the manoeuvring up to that point. I had to come to terms with either damaging the driver’s door by scrapping it up against the garage door post to get out or grinding the front bumper along the garage wall to achieve the same end. Finally, I had to accept help from one of the gloating neighbours. My wife had now crossed her arms dejectedly and was sitting on the doorstep steadfastly refusing to offer me any assistance at all. She held an expression that said: “don’t worry, dear neighbours, I’m divorcing him tomorrow!”

Somehow I managed to avoid both scrapping the door and grinding the bumper but I did have to move my wife’s car back several feet before I attempted the reversing move and this was seen by me and by my audience as a defeat or, at least, a points deduction like knocking over the fence at a horse-trial.

I thanked the neighbour as graciously as I was able to whilst cursing under my breath.

Humiliating!

Then I nonchalantly moved the cars around sensibly putting my wife’s car in her garage and mine in mine. Exactly, what I should have done 30 minutes earlier.

As I walked up to the front door my wife gave me that look, the one that said: “I hope that the genes responsible for that little display have not been inherited by my children!”

She didn’t say anything however, she just shock her head in disbelief and led me inside where I couldn’t do anymore damage to our standing in the community.

Another amusing but equally embarrassing incident occurred a few months later. I was in Sheffield again on business, I had arrived earlier than expected before my appointment. So I had time to go along to the Wednesday shop at Hillsborough and help the club a little by purchasing some of the quality merchandise purveyed there: new team shirt, new mug et cetera. As I returned to the car laudably complacent with my striped blue and white nylon carrier bag, I noticed that one of the groundsman was standing at the gates apparently waiting for something. I went to have a chat. Wednesday had lost to Crystal Palace away the night before and the players were due back at the ground this morning for a debrief. This was unusual as normally I’d expect them to go to the training ground at Middlewood just down the road. So I went back to the car to make some calls and hang around to see what I could see. It was a hot day and I had the front windows and sunshine roof open as I talked to one of the sales guys: a Chelsea fan. We’d been to a few games together. The previous winter (1994), we’d been to an FA Cup game in the February snow when Chelsea played Wednesday at Stamford Bridge which was a mess then with all the re-development going on. The Wednesdayites were singing proudly with their shirts off and berating the ‘soft southerners’ around them. For the record, Chelsea scored in the first half but in the second half David Hirst, recently returned from injury, terrorised them into submission and Graham Hyde eventually scored the equaliser. It finished a one all draw, but Wednesday should have won.

Back at Hillsborough in the car park on a hot spring day with the windows and the sunroof wide open, I was talking to my friend using the hands-free phone device about a proposal we were working on at the time. As we were talking a dark-red Jaguar pulled into the car park and parked close to me. The registration was: ‘WAD 8’. The driver’s door opened and out stepped Lord Admiral Sir Chrissy Waddle (DSO and bar), a God amongst mere mortals.

“Guess who just got out of the car next to mine?” I asked quietly.

“Where are you?”

“I’m at Hillsborough – at the club shop,” I answered excitedly.

“Is it Olly the Owl?”

“Piss Off! It’s only Chrissy Waddle, isn’t it?”

“Can he hear us talking?”

“No, we’re not shouting so probably not,” I was a little confused by his question.

“CHRIS WADDLE’S A WANKER!” he shouted at the top of his voice through the speaker.

I cut the call and I got out of there as fast as I could.

I have since checked the exact date of this incident, to make sure that I hadn’t dreamt it. It was the morning of the 15^th March 1995. The ides of March.

The car scheme was slowly upgrading and I’d been promoted again so I was able to secure a better company car, although it must still be a diesel. I was getting tired of the Rover having had it for nearly six months and as luck would have it, one of my team, the one who had the good musical taste, had just bought himself a caravan and wasn’t very happy with his current car because it didn’t have the power to pull it adequately nor was he happy with the diesel car he’d have to order next because it wouldn’t have the power either.

Here was another opportunity for me. Once again, I worked my charm with car fleet and my boss and managed to offer the Rover to the chap I managed which was perfect for his needs and to order a new company car for yourself. True, the new company car would still be a diesel, but it was to be an Audi. I had already driven an Audi 80 diesel whilst the Rover 800i was off the road being serviced and I had liked it although it was metallic green. There’s something very strange about the colour green with cars, isn’t there? More accidents occur with green cars than with any other colour and this was immediately apparent as cars would leap out of side roads at me and pedestrians would step off the kerb right in front of me. Scary stuff. I vowed never to get another green car.

Just before we leave the Rover for good, there’s a little postscript to this chapter. I handed the Rover over to one of my team members. Any sensible bloke would have taken it to a professional to fit the tow-bar and sort out all the electrics so that when you indicated or applied the brake then the indicators or the brake lights would work correctly on the caravan lights bar too. But not this chap, he was a great DIY enthusiast and would turn his hand to anything, regardless of his lack of experience. Sometimes this was a great success and saved me a small fortune and sometimes it was an unmitigated disaster and cost him a packet to remedy the situation.

He decided to put the tow-bar on himself over the weekend and connect up all the electrics too, after all, how difficult could it be? On the Monday morning, he was in the car-park talking to the fleet manager.

“Is everything alright?” I asked innocently enough.

“No, it is not. I’m going have to get this done properly. Bloody 300 quid they want from me to sort it out.”

“What happened then?”

He directed me to the Rover to sit in the passenger side and watch. He turned the engine on and moved the indicator lever to indicate that we were turning right but instead of the familiar ticking of the indicator there was a slurring noise and my passenger electric window went down. When I pushed the window button to put the window up again – well, you’ve guessed it, the window didn’t move but the right indicator came on.

Laugh, I nearly…

 

SUMMARY (5/10): The Rover was a tool rather than a car, a rather cynical means to an end that I deployed to get something closer to what I really wanted. It wasn’t a bad car, it was just tiresomely boring and boorish, especially when driven on the motorway to antagonise the other fast lane drivers to get out of the way. It was and remains the biggest car I’ve ever had, but I’m not sure that I can give it very many points for that. It suffered from the problem that Rover Cars had had from the mid-seventies, and that led ultimately to their demise, the total package was less than the sum of its parts…it fell short of all its pretence especially when compared to the opposition on other forecourts.

Next time, it’s the Audis (1996 and 1997).