A McDonalds on the outskirts of Wellingborough. No Egg & Cheese McMuffin ® required (though caps and trademark are, obvs). Just a few lungfuls of air as I sit within the comforting surrounds of the Range Rover, listening. Just listening. It’s meant to be my audiobook (The Spitfire Murders, which sounded great but is terrible), but it’s not. It’s rain. Thundering down on the roof of the Rangie, defying the best efforts of Meridian’s finest to allow the annoyingly unctuous narrator’s voice to be heard. Why can I not just drop these things the moment I realise they’re rubbish?
And while I’m on the subject of dropping things, an entire smorgasbord of possibilities of where I’m shortly going to drop the RML P39 prototype, hereafter known as by its RML GTH production name, which sounds like something faintly disgusting with the vowels removed but isn’t, is currently revealing itself to me.
There’s the hoary old backwards through a hedge fave, but with the added frisson of punching an all-new shape in the scenery. It’s a pleasing spin (pun entirely intended), but on a too familiar theme and I’ve been here before. In a Metro 1.1S in 1991, the original Black Friday for almost the entire Autocar road test team who discovered the same patch of non-reflective ice on our test route within seconds of each other, resulting in a large number of highly creative accidents, providing bent metal, red faces, a high-speed semi-inverted trip along a ditch in a Renault 19 16v for one of my colleagues, and a story for us all to dine out upon for years to come. Perhaps another time.
