My other constant companion

During those dreary Sydney days, while Aquiline carried my spirit, my car carried my body. It is a character, having colletcted many names over time including "The Little Red Terror," "Little Red Devil" and "The Red Velocipede." This beast here is a 1985 Nissan Pulsar:

I am the third generation of the family to own this car. My great Aunt and Uncle bought it off a friend when it was 6 months old and they kept it until they died in about 2008, after which it was passed onto my Uncle Darryl in their will. My Father bought it off him for a grand and gave it to me. It had spent the vast majority of its life in a garage and was generally only used to go to the shops and back. It has hardly a rust on the body and the paint is hardly faded. However, it had a lot of aged parts that I have had to replace over time. It had no functional handbrake, cracked exhaust manifold gasket, leaking rear brake cylinders and ball joints so worn that you'd have to be a weightlifter to steer it. I have had grown men asking me how I manage with it. As I have gone through with repairs, it has become very reliable and it only broke down on me once because the original 25 year old radiator packed in. It did not have reliable indicators when I got it and the culprit was copper corrosion on the connections in the hazard light button. I also had o glue the frontpassenge window back onto the bracket because the glue had perished.

Whenever I felt stressed I would go out and sit with the car and perhaps give it a wash or do some other work on it. To me the car represents safety. I survived a fair amount of domestic abuse by housemates during my time in Sydney and if I did not have the car, I would have been dead by now because wouldn't have the ability to escape fom these dangerous situations. For me, this little old car that no-one else wanted and many people told me to dump, was my ticket out of the wretched place called Sydney. I was born in Sydney but I did not belong there. The Sydney I was born into did not exist anymore anyway. Back in the late 80's and early 90's people stil had pet sheep in their backyards. When people are alone they tend to personify things and to me there is no experience more isolating than being in a sea of people. My Little Red Terror grew eyes and ears. I do swear that driving it is more like managing an animal because you have to understand the sound of the engine closely to know when it wants to shift gears. It is noisy for its size and has a good thoaty purr to it.

This is the cockpit of my red rocket. The only modern feature it has is an automatic choke. It only has an AM radio, no cassette player even. There is no air conditioning, so it roasts in summer by virtue of its greenhouse inducing sloping frontand back windcreens. My late uncle bolted the mini fan to the floor and it does help a bit. The fuel gauge gave up at about 17,000 km. I can tell this because there are notepads in the glove box that record the mileage so that one can calculate fuel consumption. I am still doing that now because it has no trip meter nd I have not found a spare fuel sender unit.