Agony of the Aston Martin de-tox
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; it was the day they delivered the Aston Martin, it was the night they took her away …
Life without a whopping great DBS is hellish, a jumble of confusion and emotional dislocation. The Who famously sung about a “teenage wasteland” and I am stranded in the 40-plus equivalent, a middle-age wasteland.
The thoroughly nice chaps at Aston Martin – and they are thoroughly nice, they really are – let me loose in the machine driven by Daniel Craig in Quantum of Solace. All fine, brilliant.
Disappointingly, though, they wanted the car back.
Life can now be divided into two distinct phases – AM (ante Martin) and PM (post Martin). It is PM+5 and the pain is getting worse.
Where once there was £160,000-worth of the ultimate sports car, there is only emptiness.
On PM+1 I looked out of the bedroom window at the spot where she had been. I spied an imprint of her dainty 20-inch tyres in the decaying autumn leaves. That’s all I have now, traces in a gutter.
That morning I had to take the bus to work. Imagine it, the bus, after driving an Aston Martin.
One day, I’m lording it behind the wheel of James Bond’s run-around and the next I’m expected to queue up with people wearing tracksuits. One bloke was wearing sandals.
Frightful.
Aston Martin doesn’t prepare you for any of this. There’s no phased withdrawal from automotive glory, no gentle re-introduction into normal society, no counselling about the real world.
There’s diddly squat for the DBS dearly departed.
Worse still, I couldn’t scrape together the bus fare and had to blag a quid from one of my daughters.
Standing in the bus shelter, it was impossible to miss the rotting remains of a chicken chow mein a fellow traveller had regurgitated the previous night. A promotion in a shop window promised a lucky winner a year’s supply of Clinton cards.
I’d rather have 12-months’ supply of frozen peas.
Just to rub it in further, there were posters of Bond and Quantum Of Solace everywhere – and then it happened. Bam!
The woman on the bus next to me turned her head, stared into my tearful eyes and said: “I’ve got to tell you and I hope you don’t mind . . . but you just smell gorgeous.” (Allure, by Chanel.)
Sure, Lynne (I had to ask her name) was about 60, and therefore old enough to be my mother, but her compliment could not have come at a better time.
I may no longer have the DBS, but like Blanche Dubois, in A Streetcar Named Desire, I can rely on the kindness of strangers.
