The best and worst car in the world

    There is something very satisfying about spending one of the first warm weekends of spring outdoors. Warm enough not to feel chilly, though not yet with that feeling of being in a warm bath from the air temperature one gets in the summer. Green buds showing on all the trees, the crows mobbing the buzzard when it came too close to their nest site, and a bumble bee meandering through the emerging greenery.
    I was outdoors because I was reassembling the Wreck's engine. Nothing too challenging, just a long sequence of parts to put together.
    Well, I say nothing too challenging. But I was struck as I have been before: with my engineer's eye I look at some of the assemblies and wonder why on earth they designed them as they did. The nut at the rear of the carburettor that requires either a 1/2" spanner with a 45 degree bend, or else a 2" long shaft. Or the exhaust manifold, the centre two fixing nuts of which can only be done up slowly by hand with a ring spanner.
    I once saw a documentary about the Wreck and its derivative cars. It had a section on the factory which was newly built for the Wreck's model line. I am guessing my car would have been built in its first few months. The documentary went on at length about how advanced the production line was, and how it was one of the first major factories to use CCTV for inspection. Very impressive, but I can only now think of those manifold nuts. If it's such an efficient factory it's churning out Wrecks at an impressive rate, right up until the point at which they attach the exhaust manifold. At which point there's a bloke with a ring spanner laboriously tightening up those two middle nuts by hand. No super-quick air tools will fit on them. It took me a couple of minutes to do each one, I'm guessing someone practiced could shave 30 seconds from the time. Or more likely not tighten them up properly, which I suspect is why the original manifold gasket had burned away around the two central exhaust ports.
    When Austin unveiled the Mini in 1959, the engineers at Ford famously bought one and dismantled it completely to cost its production. Their concerns that it would affect their Anglia model were muted when they concluded that it cost more to build than its list price. Looking at the Wreck's design, sometimes ingenious yet more often downright baffling, I can only conclude that the disease of poor manufacturing design was not limited to Austin's engineers.
    There are many theories about the decline of the indigenous British motor industry. In the 1950s and 1960s cars like the Wreck, the Mini or the Anglia were ubiquitous here and in many other countries, by the 1980s and 1990s their successors were something of a national embarrassment.  The misty-eyed will cite trade unions, dodgy Russian steel, bad management and disloyal consumers, but they rarely look at the cars and admit that some of them just weren't very well designed. Comparing the 1980s Austin Metro I had in the mid '90s with the 1980s Volkswagen Golf  I had at the end of the '90s was a revelation for me. Instead of a machine that required all sorts of know-how for fixing hard-to-reach parts which kept failing I had a car that just worked. And kept on working, even though it had had a hard life before I owned it and drank cheap oil as a down-and-out drinks Special Brew.
    I love the Wreck, with all its quirks. It's a slow car with major handling flaws and woeful brakes, but it's fun to drive and I like its period styling. But that won't blinker me as to why its successors are no longer in production and the site of the factory where it was built is now a housing estate.

Getting on with it.

    It's a lovely spring day in Southern England, and I'm off to a friend's wedding in a couple of hours. The magnolia is coming out, and fat green leaf buds are showing on the trees.
    Not being one for treating transition as a tick-box list of achievements, it was a while before it struck me I've been full-time for six months. Life's just gone on. In years of following blogs in this sphere I've read many breathless descriptions of milestones - I've probably written a few myself! - but this one if indeed it is a milestone has passed almost unnoticed. Which is the way it should be.
    Short post? Isn't much more to write on this subject, is there.

Another day, another language ban

    News from the world of language this week: a campaign  from one of the Facebook bosses to ban the word "bossy" as applied to women. It's received the support of  celebrities and a lot of news coverage.
    It's true, "bossy" is used disproportionately with respect to women, and particularly with respect to women who have achieved success. And in that use it is a mild pejorative, a piece of annoying mild sexism rather than a hate word. One that is probably better not used.
    I have to admit I have a problem with the campaign to ban it. Not because of its aim, but because of its futility. However laudable your aim, language does not change just because you say it should. Language use is in the hands of its speakers, not in those of a few people. Like the campaign to suppress a sense of "gay" I wrote about a couple of months ago this campaign risks the opposite effect to its intent, turning "bossy" from a mild annoyance to a word with barbs. MtF transgender people have the unique perspective of having seen male locker room culture at work, and based on that experience I predict the "bossy" campaign will result in more use of the word, not less.