I was taken by surprise by the past today, in the strangest fashion.
I’m on this job because of someone I met loading tables onto a van in Shoreditch. He introduced me to an event company that has brought much mad joy into my life. He is a man of few words, but I’ve always felt fellow feeling with him and enjoyed his lack of nonsense.
He worked out who my dad was last week. “Was your dad Norman?” “Yes”
Dad was racing everything long before people were putting it all on the internet. He was one of the survivors from a small crew who left the army after WW2 and fell into making things go faster. He was dragster racing in absolute deathtraps, running through however many fucking gears those things had, momentarily being faster than anyone. He was racing powerboats before they were safe when they were just engines too big for the boat, lifting the prow. There’s a cine video mum took where he flips and barrels at top speed. Without the barrel, broken necks all round. He just turns round and keeps going. He was called world champion for it multiple years including the year I was born. He was a multiple winter Olympian, first man to waterski across the Irish sea, one of the first to cross the Swiss Alps in a hot air balloon. Majestically stupid shit he got up to. He taught me how to drive just in time, his declining years overlapped with my mid teens. I know engines a bit because of him. He did so much stuff at a time when drivers were engineers as well. You didn’t have a team. It was you and you with you.
In 1968 The Daily Express sponsored a London to Sydney marathon, and dad thought it was a load of pomposity so he entered it in a vintage 1920’s racing Bentley. He and his mates Keith and Patrick were running interference while everyone else had modern tooled up rally cars. They were never very popular with the “this is a serious race” crowd, being jokers who wanted to see if they could win anyway. Their car needed repairing and they ran emergency repairs on a boat and were disqualified by the joyless.
Darren’s dad won the same race in a Hillman Hunter.
And here we are in Paris together, and Kester is one of the first humans I’ve met for a long long time that can tell me things I didn’t know about my dad, and somehow we’ve been workfriends for over a decade now. Life is bonkers.
I’ve wanted to try and follow in my dad’s footsteps, in a car that is fucked, maybe avoid Afghanistan, make a documentary. You need a team of three. I know who I think the third should be… Through the land of oil… … Nothing happens by mistake and my brain is going tickerticker now… Energy. Movement. Everything for a reason. Lord alive.
Problem is, Keith’s daughter flogged their Bentley as part of a job lot. Hard work to find a new one… But I’m always up for a project.
AlBarclay 