Dear Andrew,
I hope you’re proud of yourself; for the first time in your life doing something because you wanted to rather than because someone else said you should. Yes, you lied a bit to get that job at Autocar and, no, you haven’t a clue what you’re doing, but you do love cars and although you’re a pretty terrible writer, there’s just about enough between your ears to address that, at least in time and with the right tuition.
Be aware of the job you have: it’s the late 1980s, you’re in your early 20s and you’re an Autocar road tester! Yes, you’re skint and on twelve grand a year that’s the way you’re going to stay for the foreseeable, but while your mates crawl into their machine washable suits and strap-hang the length of the District Line, you’ll be in jeans and a T-shirt, strapping yourself into a car no one has seen on British roads before and heading off to the test track. Yes, it’ll be slow, cheap and quite likely to break because they’re not going to trust you with the good stuff yet, but hey, you could be stacking shelves or selling ice cream in a rainstorm. And you remember what both of those are like, don’t you?
You will at regular intervals get cold, wet, scared, frustrated, exhausted and thoroughly pissed off with everything, and just once you’ll be properly hurt, but you are an Autocar road tester. At your age and with your frankly limited potential and skill set, there is literally no better job in the world. You are one of the luckiest sods alive.
