Back again.
This time following a devastating attack by this computers PSU (Power Supply Unit) which took it upon itself to destroy the central processor, the motherboard and the hard disk drive prior to expiring itself. And whilst I prefer to live with the notion of pronoia (the uneasy feeling that others are conspiring behind your back to help you) I’m nonetheless tempted to feel quite the opposite.
We are all conscious, or perhaps sensitive to greater or lesser extent to the psychic lives of the machines and systems we create. For example: you lent your djhgf to a true and trusted friend for three days but when it was duly returned, on time and in perfect condition you felt it was somehow no longer your own. Of course hijacking is an outrage we readily associate with airliners rather than a plain old-fashioned djhgf but somehow the bond you had with it, despite being unaware that such a bond even existed or was even possible had been broken. The most sensitive buy a new one and cross off so and so as a true and trusted friend, before evolving into the miserable bastard who refuses to lend anything to anyone for any reason. By contrast, the most sensitive amongst us can borrow a djhgf, return it late and in several pieces without disrupting the owners personal bond or offering to pay for repairs or new parts. These are our true and trusted friends.
In my world there are two distinct reasons for mechanical breakdown. (1) It’s broken. (2) It’s thought of something it would rather do but lacks a communication method to inform us of a sudden change of direction. Clearly a mechanism can simply break for a multitude of reasons that usually boil down to lousy thinking during the preliminary design stage. This is where it’s falsely assumed a minute error of judgment will be ironed-out later as more and more people become involved during manufacture, advertising, packaging and eventual distribution.
Of ultimate delight to me are the mechanisms in perfect working order that simply refuse to function along with those which couldn’t possibly function but do anyway. The former are the ones most likely to have thought of a career change or perhaps some brilliant original idea but until we, as designers, learn to factor for a machines psychic life we will fail to learn of its new career aspirations or the nature of its brilliant original idea. Sometimes referred to as Friday afternoon ones they resist all and any attempts at rectification. Money pits where losses must be faced and the machine is inserted into a dumpster. The latter include machines that so heartily enjoy the work they do they manage to function as intended even when bits are missing. Often though, these are the machines which continue to function on the condition that we remain unaware that inner bits are missing or broken.
Only most recently is the idea slowly dawning that the results of experiments are influenced by observation, just as the functioning of an apparatus is very often influenced by our expectation of what it’s supposed to do.
Having recently moved into N.Wales I was not shocked to discover myself standing in a muddy field near a village with an unpronounceable name talking to Bryn, the harried shepherd, his two hundred odd sheep and his overenthusiastic sheepdog Mick. Clearly shepherding is no soft option these days judging by the profusion of syringes and bottles of pills and potions and ointments and sprays for runny ears, runny noses, runny bottoms and rampant foot rot that roll around in the back of Bryn’s battered Defender. Naturally a conversation with Bryn is punctuated by frequent calls on his mobile telephone from pharmaceutical giants announcing amazing new drugs with which to inject or generally impregnate sheep that will instantly end the medical misery for them all.
While young Mick rounded up a few flock members for essential foot surgery in the clever sheep inverting machine I thought of asking Bryn if he ever pondered the genius of Stone Age Man who domesticated sheep in the first place. Mick continued his endless task, now separating all those in urgent need of industrial antibiotics if they were to survive into the late afternoon, while Bryn filled a concrete pit with awesome chemicals into which he would partially drown the remainder as an instant restorative for bowel and liver parasites. “It never bloody ends.” Said Bryn, reaching for his battered A to Z of common sheep ailments, a massive syringe and his mobile, while I pondered his Great Great Grandfather healing his flock without the miracle remedies on offer from modern science. Perhaps his sheep never became diseased, and if that’s the case then what happened to render the modern shepherd so dependent upon modern science other than cash?
“Yes, me again, would you add another fifty sacks of colloidal anhydrous silica to today’s delivery? Yeah…..Yeah…..Runny bums again. It’s a mess. Better add another five gallons of magnesium stearate and another thousand needles. Yeah….Yeah….Thanks bye for now.” Bryn grimaced. “That’s another eighty quid but at least the mornings problems will be sorted out.”
Stone Age Man domesticated sheep. Before or after they converted inedible microscopic grass seeds into the cereals that sustain us today will never be known because we simply don’t care enough. Perhaps sheep had evolved without serious competition into such vicious and vindictive monsters they threatened to overwhelm humankind in huge unstoppable flocks, raiding our villages to the point where; something had to be done. Elders considered the problem for perhaps minutes or perhaps generations for again we have no idea while the issue remains so completely inconsequential. Personally I believe an executive decision was reached to advance the mind of man by capturing a breeding pair of these fiends in order to establish the balance of power once and for all.
Prior to this crucial development in rational thinking the pair in question would naturally have been set-upon by the whole tribe and instantly shredded for meat and skins and perhaps tools in the kill or be killed MO which had brought mankind successfully thus far.
This time though, mans mortal enemy would be firmly restrained in stout holding pens where study groups could consider their options, develop feasibility studies, rudimentary math modelling, divine the next move forward, save humankind, we had just invented husbandry. In this groundbreaking case the committee ruled that whenever either beast bellowed or butted or kicked in protest at being subjugated to mans will for the first time in history they would be bashed over the head with a large stone. Methodology was born. Scientifically induced brain damage would finally bring an arch enemy to heel, and whilst the glorious idea of revenge is not exactly scientific thinking they decided to indulge themselves all the same. Not only would sheep become panic stricken at the sight of man for time everlasting they would be terrified at the mere sight of small children to an equal degree. We had just invented the larder along with unlimited supplies of wool, a curious greasy product which might prove useful in the future. Of course the intensity of each successive bash on the head would become critical in terms of conditioning. Too little would simply prolong the process unnecessarily, too much would render the savage beast unconscious or worse. Skull bashing stones would be standardized.
It is suggested that dogs watched this painful and lengthy process of animal domestication and elected to ingratiate himself upon man to become the willing little helper he remains today. How sweet. Such exquisite cunning: to become self-domesticated and offer to organize and guard the larder as a certain alternative to becoming a part of it.
Having ones cranium systematically bashed with a large stone whenever you did anything other than calmly eat grass and occasionally breed would surely leave faint traces of memory within the battered brain of a sheep. However, Stone Age Man completed his task with such precision that any sheep who experiences a fleeting flash-back of its former self will charge another sheep to bash their heads together as a reminder to fear the master race and return to calmly eating grass.
“I’ve never had a vacation.” Said Bryn, inspecting the contents of open sores on the batch of sheep Mick had just rounded up. The smell stung his eyes. “I haven’t seen my wife in natural light for seventeen years. Can’t even remember her name.”
Oh how I wish I had been there, living in New York City during the late eighteen hundreds and visiting the workshop of Nicola Tesla soon after he had invented and built the worlds first alternating current generator. One of his early prototypes saw electrical energy alternating at a dizzying sixty cycles per second and in Tesla’s world a reasonable starting point towards his ultimate goal of increasing the frequency until he would transmit the stuff into our homes to light our lives.
On a grey Wednesday afternoon I would have paid him a visit and bunged-up the keyhole in his workshop door to prevent Thomas Edison from spying this primitive contraption, making notes on the design and then dashing across town to the patent office to condemn humanity to live with it forever.
Over tea and Hungarian pastries Nicola sat on a crate with ‘radio Mk1’ stencilled on it and explained why generating electricity for the masses at only sixty cycles per second would in all respects be impractical, brutish, far too expensive and would certainly result in a catastrophic disaster for future earth resources. He eyed the keyhole saying he must get around to bunging it up after catching some bloke called Marconi peering through it only the week before. “In one year from now I will provide electric light for an entire nation from one single clean hydro-electric generator. Whether or not I succeed in transmitting electricity will be immaterial because at several thousand cycles per second the wires that transport it will be very very small indeed. “
Meanwhile, Tom strolled leisurely from the New York patent office into radiant sunshine and the history books assured that once domestic electricity was supplied to the masses at sixty cycles per second, regardless of the voltage, there would, indeed there could never be, any turning back.
So that was that, and Edison was correct in his assessment that new technology from immigrant dreamers can be frozen in time en route to making himself one of the richest men in America.
Naturally we prefer to assume a stuff so readily available as electricity is the product of our greatest thinkers getting their collective heads together, performing countless experiments with unlimited funds to achieve optimum results for our general comfort and well-being. Not so, it’s the dreamers who think that common sense will prevail in such important matters, so, to support the point let’s take a trip to Electric Mountain in N. Wales. A six quid bus ride inside he mountain to be exact to view the turbines which supply the power to the U.K. when a zillion people turn on their electric kettles prior to an outbreak of Eastenders.
Down and down we go into the heart of Electric Mountain while a company woman who has no reason to have heard of Nicola Tesla attempts to prepare us all for the shear scale of her turbine room. As predicted by Tesla himself the turbine room took ten years to excavate, sports a floor area the size of two football pitches into which sit the six monster machines which bail us out when we all fancy a cuppa at the same time. There’s a natural lake near the summit of Electric Mountain so they burrowed underneath it and fitted it with humungous pipes which allow the lake to plummet vertically, through the turbines which generate emergency power before settling into another lake at the foot of the mountain.
Oh how I wish I had been there, seated at the breakfast table of Mrs Kilpatrick’s Saltash boarding house The Dusty Aspidistra (for gentlemen only) when Isambard Kingdom Brunel swept majestically into the room to seat Himself opposite to myself to announce His brilliant original idea of an atmospheric railway. Bliss indescribable. Over kippers or a lightly boiled egg, for I do not know because I wasn’t there, He explained how He would place a tube between railway tracks between Paignton and Dawlish and then suck all the air out of it. I told Him I was fascinated already, couldn’t wait to hear the details and would He be an absolute doll and pass the marmalade.
In essence, people would board the train in Dawlish and patiently wait while a vacuum pump located at the other end (Paignton in this case, please try to keep up) sucked the air out until a piston inside the tube, connected by a… thing to the underside of the train overcame the coefficient of friction so atmospheric pressure pushed it to its destination. Brilliant. For the first time in history a mode of public transport not required to haul its own noisy filthy smelly power source. Clearly the tube had a slot in the top running the entire length, which Brunel would keep closed with an airtight leather seal except for where the thing protruded to connect to the train. Sadly for us all, rats chewed through the airtight leather seals to the point where He abandoned the idea and we returned to building larger noisier, filthier and smellier engines to drag our trains about.
But for rats that could have become the accepted mode of transport to this very day. But for rats our transport system would be propelled by natural pressure. But for rats it would have been silent and clean. Rats!
Poor, poor science, it cannot find a single shred of fossil evidence to show the evolution of the feather but it continues to believe that a lineage of lizards decided to evolve into birds. Sad isn’t it. Approximately a trillion years ago Gerald the lizard who loved to eat insects noticed there were more insects in the sky above his head than there were on the ground, which lead to Gerald’s brilliant original idea. Fuelled mostly by hunger or possibly greed he decided to turn most of his scales into feathers so he could launch himself into the skies to feed to his hearts content. Sadly Gerald the lizard failed in his quest to become the worlds first flying reptile when he fell off a cliff escaping the fangs of a meat shredding monster; Tyrannosaurus Rex. Luckily though, Gerald’s wife Margery had just
hatched their only son and she passed her late husbands brilliant original idea to little Eric.
And so it went on, onward through the generations until a small reptile sprouted partly formed wings, formerly his front legs, covered by partly formed feathers and therefore about half way to becoming a bird. No longer a perfectly good lizard and still a million years from being a bird the silly thing could never have survived the Darwinian claim that only the fittest survive.
Theories fly in all directions to explain the evolution of the feather but none will provide us with a definitive solution because we could not tolerate the existence of one.
A sparrow sets off to fly the seven miles between Denbigh to Ruthin. But first it must cover half the distance, in this case a distance of three and a half miles. With three and a half miles remaining it must cover exactly half of that distance and then it must cover half the remaining distance and so on and so on in order to prove it could not possibly ever get there, as you can always halve any distance no matter how small it gets, any more than it could have learned to fly in the first place. Isn’t this fun? It certainly beats a two-hour calculus exam with no coffee or cigarettes in order to keep apace with that know-it-all Sir Isaac Bloody Newton.
Oh how happy I am that I was not there, living anywhere between Newton’s house and the London law courts. I could have been mown down just collecting a pint of milk from my doorstep let alone crossing the street to buy a paper.
When algebra was invented by beautiful minds living somewhere in Babylon it was just that; a thing of beauty, an abstraction, never intended as a definitive means with which to distribute traffic cones or curtail an epidemic of foot and mouth disease. The brilliant original idea was to introduce an unknown variable into any situation just for the fun changing an expected outcome, or even chuck in two and call it party time.
It’s a matter of public record that Newton possessed an ego of biblical proportions along with an intellect that was ugly beyond sin. Know-it-all Newton went to war with the entire world in his effort to claim that his brain was at least twice the size of Jupiter when in reality he created an unbridgeable chasm between science and the State. In effect he had invented a language for science called the deferential and integral calculus that would sound plausible while remaining utterly incomprehensible to its political paymasters which simply opened the floodgates for scientific fraud.
When trying to repair a hdgjfw on your dining room table a small bit falls to the floor; it was Newton who developed the terrifying equations of motion that will pinpoint to the nearest millimetre where it is not going to be when you reach down to pick it up. His indomitable laws of universal motion which fail us all when that vital little bit eventually turns up in the kitchen. In the back of a cupboard. In a Brillo box. That was there when you moved in. Welcome to my world.

A LAND ROVER IN COSTA RICA

is a true story destined to end in tears. When the mechanic handed back my Land Rover keys, having just executed about half of the work required he said (In Spanish) “It’s the diesel injection distribution pump what’s gone wrong but I can’t fix it here.” Here being a rusted corrugated lean-to workshop leaning against his house, another lean-to. So I thought, well, I can certainly fix you mate for costing me twice my current earnings. There are boys down in deep Somerset who write manuals for motor vehicles, and as there aren’t any manuals in Costa Rica because Costa Rican mechanics don’t believe in them, I’ll beg my sister to post one over.
Oh, the bliss of anticipation. Retribution? I purchased a set of five metric spanners and camped out in front of my post office box building in Guapiles. (Guop-ill-is). On the tenth day, riding the crammed bus home I planned to become an expert on the revival of Land Rover diesel injection distribution pumps. With ears bleeding from the volume of Mexican pop music and eyes blurred as we traverse the pot-holes Mr Haynes announces: “Due to the technical complexity of Land Rover diesel injection distribution pumps we recommend sending faulty ones to your nearest Land Rover specialist for overhaul, therefore we offer no guidance whatsoever to the enthusiastic incompetent.” Bugger!
But I have another ace up my sleeve, I get the last laugh because I own a diesel Land Rover that’s got something wrong with every little bit of it. This is mechanical senility setting in, and it’s rapidly spreading. Those boys in Silihull, you have to laugh, they built a joke Land Rover and shipped it to Central America. But who has the manual now, and an awesome set of tools to complement it?
This deep rural Costa Rica where most of the very very old men still remember ox carts and Land Rovers before waking up, joining the twentieth century and switching to Toyota’s. Having said that, most of the very very old men around my way now drive huge futuristic Mitsubishi’s from deals struck for exotic wood for Japan, but that’s another horror story.
Having almost given up on local mechanics I travel to the local farmers watering hole with the intention of getting them even drunker if at all possible and hope for secret intelligence on fixing Land Rovers. They stagger outside to offer me the combined wisdom of about eight hundred years of Land Rover repairs and all agree the current overheating problem is caused by a faulty water pump.
Now then, the art of mechanics lies in the preparation. Everyone should know that. Rather like a medical procedure, I have plenty of lint free rags, (formerly my clothes and bedding) a gallon of surgical petrol, imported de-greasing agents, old cereal packets to fashion new gaskets, five new spanners and plenty of space for the operation. (Costa Rica)
Following the manual to the letter the entire day disappears without trace before I manage to yank the water pump and housing off the front of the engine. What I find inside is truly amazing. Not only is my water pump in perfect working order, it’s in better condition than the one featured by Haynes in their book. I have a water pump with impeccable impeller blades all over it, so how is it, when I shove everything back together, fire-up the old diesel motor, it still doesn’t pump water, so the engine overheats?
This is as baffling as the new emerging physics, where the outcome of an experiment is or isn’t influenced by whether or not any part or all of it was observed by the experimenter. This leads me to conclude I have just examined a water pump that works perfectly but would now prefer to pump something else instead. Perhaps something more sophisticated than plain ordinary tap water having pumped the stuff for so many years. Chilled Frascati might be an improvement. Heavy water sold by the gram? Who knows, and to embrace the new emerging psychology…who bloody well cares?
The answer to my problems may indeed be buried within the geometry of Stonehenge, or blowing tumbleweed through a deserted Solihull car park, I’m just a tiny bit annoyed and decide to adhere to the manual and a trip to…Thermostat World. My new manual has little captions next to each exiting new mechanical task, taking the form of five blank spanners going up to five inked-in spanners to illustrate degrees of difficulty. One inked-in spanner out of five means the job could be done by a five year old child with one spanner. Five out of five inked-in spanners means the boys back in Solihull couldn’t do it with a dedicated factory and an infinite number of spanners.
Thermostats are a one inked-in spanner little jobette I feel I could perform with confidence. Perhaps a dim little point of light through a very long dark tunnel and I simply cannot wait to get started to: Getting to know and understand your thermostat. I will learn to discover where it lives on the engine, how to extract my thermostat, how to inspect my thermostat for wear or possible damage and finally how to replace my thermostat. Half a working day later I find someone’s beaten me to it and either sold it or more likely chucked it into a fresh water stream along with the previous battery. But who cares? These are a people who have no word for frost. No phrases like, “Fuckin hell it’s parky out there.” I made a new Kellogg’s gasket, bolted everything back together and decided to live without one.
I took my Land Rover in for it’s regular Friday afternoon oil change where my new mate Manuel invites myself and Maria to his sisters wedding and informs me there is now diesel fuel finding itself in the oil sump. Brilliant. I tell Manuel I’m genuinely happy his sister is to marry the son of a rich coffee baron who will never have to live with mechanical failure and then asked him how many inked-in spanners it will take to fix it. Manuel said maybe three or four but added I should do it today before wasting good hard earned money on fresh oil. I just don’t know. Those boys from Solihull, you have to laugh, they invented the whole idea of wasting good hard earned money.
Manuel climbed wearily from his inspection pit, clearly sick of inspecting British engineering to inform me I now sport a new leak in one of my numerous sumps and a front leaf spring has snapped. Wearily I return to my workshop, (formerly the house) I check my rear view mirror for a late afternoon engine-weather report. Dense fog as usual. Great billowing clouds of noxious gasses, mostly white, some bluish streaks, and today some very ominous dark grey. They probably monitor me and Maria going to the shops from a satellite. It has to be the diesel pump, so I resolve to fix it before the local primary school reports me to Greenpeace.
Mr Haynes informs us the Land Rover was first built in 1948 which I do find remarkable, when in all probability the original design was submitted in 1848 why did they wait so long?
Out of genuine concern I glance at my oil pressure gauge. It shows a nice steady 5 P.S.I. Nothing surprising there, last week it was only 3. But it’s getting late and today turns out to be yet another spontaneous holiday for the generator, so the battery’s not charging and going flat.
Diesel fuel pumps are in fact a two inked-in spanner job. Well, it maybe a two spanner job with the engine sitting on a kitchen worktop but it’s definitely not when it’s still bolted to the chassis. And, extracting a Land Rover engine involves an incalculable number of spanners so I resolve to get on with it anyway. Just think of irreversible damage to our atmosphere, let alone the multitude of gassed dead animals I leave in my wake. Endangered species? That’s a laugh. They are now.
As anticipated there was nothing wrong with it. As far as I could tell anyway because when I finally got it off and took it to pieces it looked nothing like the one featured in my Haynes manual. But this is Costa Rica so my fuel pump could have come from a Mack truck. Who knows? But you have to laugh. Don’t you? So now I’m back to buying bottles of New Formula Magic Smoke Gone and New Formula Miracle Diesel Cleaner. Amazing stuff. Like most American imports. Useless.
This gets graver and graver on a daily basis. I now know how it feels to sit and ponder the on/off switch of a life support machine, with someone I don’t know connected to it. I also begin to consider the idea of the psychic lives of the machines which we continue to drag from the ether into gross reality.
Everything now seems to point to my fuel distribution thing; the only component beyond the scope of even five inked-in spanners, There’s a place in the capital where they do that kind of think for a living, probably some obscure sub contractor for NASA but that’s sixty miles away, with most of it uphill, so out of reach and therefore out of the question.
This Land Rover reminds me more and more of a swamp and I’m excluding here the fetid smell of the seats. Both operate on a fine tuned eco-system where balance is critical to death or survival. So I have the injector overhauled, and it breathes new life back into the motor. Now it’s ready for another decade of happy roving. Who knows? The operation may even restore it’s long lost oil pressure and raise it’s maximum velocity to a dizzying forty miles per hour. But the gearbox being next in line goes immediately into a state of shock. So it goes on, rattling back through the system until the rear tow hitch falls off, wing mirrors cease to reflect light, and your days of Land Roving are over and out.
Those boys from Solihull. You’ve got to laugh.
I found another mechanic yesterday. It took another oil change to get there, but I think it was worth it. A dedicated bloke who’s probably never seen a Haynes manual in his life. His own preference is a 1970 model which he’s been tinkering about with over the years, so now it sports power steering and of course servo brakes because under the bonnet lives a monstrous Toyota diesel engine.
This isn’t silly go-faster-tom-foolery by the way, he explains, it’s simply a matter of keeping up with modern traffic in a modern world and finally owning a Land Rover that’s reliable. So that’s clearly the answer, or his anyway. Toyota implants. Take out the old motor, strip it right down, re-con everything in a professional manner, flog it to someone suitably out of touch and buy a proper one. It makes perfect sense to me.
I guess it was only a matter of time before curiosity overtook my sense of caution, and yes you guessed it; off came the mysterious fuel injection distribution thingy. Out went all the reasons Mr Haynes told me to leave it alone. What a horrible contraption. It’s about as far removed from an SU carburettor as a Land Rover is from the concept of reliable motoring, but you have to try. Don’t you? Only three bolts secure it to the engine after all, and they’re not too intimidating, one is actually quite accessible once the air cleaner’s been ejected. Such wicked temptation. So there it sits on the living room floor in a spreading pool of its own diesel.
Of course, the vain hope along with a small prayer, is that you discover an obvious miniscule bit that’s come loose and just a little poke with a knitting needle is all that’s required to restore normality. Or perhaps a tiny component has snapped, but that’s okay because there’s a bit in Maria’s sewing machine that looks just like it, so a small sacrificial hybridisation is performed and my Land Rover is as good as new. Is it so outrageous? Am I unique in having a cassette machine that only plays music because of a strategic matchstick that’s been jammed into the mechanism to induce it to function as intended. Tricks of the trade mate. Just take off the side plate, chuck it into a ditch, then shove a paper clip between the pump housing and the drive shaft circlip and Bob’s your uncle. Instant turbo and it never wears out.
All that is clear is that a diesel fuel injector distribution pump is indeed a high-tech user-hostile piece of equipment with no user-friendly parts, which naturally begs an obvious question: What the f**k is it doing in a Land Rover in the first place? Mine would look far more at home in a nuclear submarine. I understood that Land Rovers were invented for post-war farmers who could fix anything by candlelight when the stupid thing broke down, down yonder five acre bog. Just jam that bit open with a bit of barbed wire and whack it with a mole wrench and still make it to The Sea Trout well before last orders. “Don’t know why you bother to fix it, John. I took mine off ten years ago and threw it away, been going much better ever since. Same again?”
Diesel fuel finding its way into the oil sump? That’s a laugh. Now I’ve got diesel fuel under the fridge. But still, this is the Costa Rican jungle after all, so diesel under the fridge has to be preferable to a family of mammoth tropical cockroaches, so I’ll live with it.
Now the pump has drained itself everywhere and is ready for probing in my laboratory (formerly the living room) and there’s nothing obviously wrong with it, so it’s hard to know where to begin. So I give it a vigorous shake, and sure enough it rattles like an old broken clock. But who’s to know they aren’t supposed to rattle? Everything else on a Land Rover rattles anyhow. It’s a symphony of clatter. It’s a singular feature of British design engineering, perhaps the rattle is fine tuned by experts using specialist apparatus back in Solihull before each Land Rover leaves the factory. I just don’t know. Mine sounds like two marbles mixed with small change in a plastic box, so maybe that’s perfect and there’s nothing further to worry about. Apart from diesel fuel finding it’s way into the oil sump.
So that’s about that. The pump itself is equally as impenetrable as a maximum security bank vault, but it does have a top bit that’s held in place by two tiny little bolts, so I decided to take a wee peek inside. This could so easily have been ‘it,’ finding a dead bluebottle inside which has caused so much misery for both me and my Land Rover and in just a few short hours the whole ghastly saga will be over and forgotten. Nothing. Just a myriad of bits that fall out all over the floor, and even if I could find them all, there’s no Haynes map to show me where they’re supposed to go.
Those boys, you’ve got to laugh. All these years they have fitted tow hitches to Land Rovers, but sticking them on the wrong damn end.
Today I paid some bloke a small fortune to tow me out of the jungle to Mr Land Rover over in Guapiles. His latest customer was settling up and preparing to leave in his nearly new Range Rover. Now then. I’m not a member of Mensa, heaven forbid they would have someone like me as a member, but I’m not entirely stupid neither, (draw your own conclusions, I did buy a Land Rover) but it would seem to me we have writing all over wall.
Anyway, Miguel says it’s my diesel injection distribution pump what’s wrong so it must be sent by bus to San Jose and that’s the end of it. I said that sounded familiar and didn’t tell him if it wasn’t wrong before then it certainly is now. There are bits of it still under my sofa. And while we’re at it, the timing chains worn out along with the oil pump and fuel pump. I pointed out that we’re clearly talking personal bankruptcy here, and as he’s about to resurrect my Land Rover , could he prove there is a God above who loves us all and make it go a teeny weeny bit faster.
Miguel disappeared under a pile of rotting junk in a corner of his workshop, only to reappear a few minutes later with two oil sodden items. Item one was a broad toothy grin on his oil sodden face. Item two was a bruised and battered but fully functioning Fairey Land Rover overdrive unit which Miguel held triumphantly aloft. I think it’s probably fair to say that I’ve never been so happy in my entire life. But not lottery winning ticket kind of happy. More like a sudden and unexpected contact with the divine powers that operate the universe kind of happy. The bliss of anticipation, the long lost fifth gear. Can you imagine it? Not one, not two, not even three, but FOUR gear levers to clutter the cab of my Land Rover.
I rush home on the bus with the good news. Tell Maria it’s going to be worth it after all. And yes I know, our two week old baby son now smells of WD40 but we’re in with the chance of an overdrive unit in just a few short weeks. Is this the eternal power of forgiveness at work? Pronoia?
Will we ever stop to admire the wonderful view, simply because it’s a wonderful view in Costa Rica and not because the radiator’s getting ready to explode? Stop to admire the wild flowers while we’re not waiting for a breakdown truck to show up? Could we take a trip to the coast, and swim in the sea without taking Miguel the mechanic with us? Take a Sunday afternoon drive without forgetting to pack the sandwiches and a spare Land Rover? Should I abandon my $50 a week job developing low-cost bamboo housing systems as my contribution to saving the world?
When The National Bamboo Project of Costa Rica posted me here, to the back of beyond, Milano bamboo research outpost, I reassured Maria who was six months pregnant it will all be okay. I’ll buy us a trusty British Land Rover, so when the time comes it’ll be all dieseled-up and ready for the drive to San Jose, any time night or day. In the event she very nearly delivered our baby boy on the trusty Isuzu bus. I just don’t know. Those boys back in Solihull.
The road from here to Porto Limon is sixty miles of two lane black-top banana highway and it’s lethal. There is something about bananas that’s truly terrifying, apart from the sickly taste and a nutritional value of almost zero. From growing the tedious things to harvesting to packing to transporting them by the trillion by road, aboard gigantic Saturn V rocket propelled refrigerated monsters. Inching out of our country lane onto the nightmare involves fixing chicken wire over the headlights to prevent them being sucked from their sockets by banana truck slipstream. We must shut the windows to maintain a realistic air pressure. It’s horrible. It’s worse than jury service. It’s also dangerous, and even though a Land Rover is built like a WW2 tank destined to crawl around under its own duvet of diesel smog, it’s no match for this manic endeavour to shift bunches of bananas around the globe. Clearly whoever invented the Land Rover was blissfully unaware of the demented banana industry and its efforts to transport a bunch of bananas from Costa Rica to Tesco’s in Totnes.
I’m sure we all recall the footage of an irritable rhino savaging a Land Rover in deepest darkest Africa. How many of us realized the incident only took place because the stupid thing wouldn’t start? They say Joke Rovers always travel in pairs in Africa.
Haynes publish manuals to cover the entire Land Rover range and I’ll wager they’re all raving best sellers; almost impossible to supply an ever growing demand. They probably make more money than, say, Land Rover. Interesting to note, or plain business astuteness they don’t publish a manual for a Toyota Land Cruiser because they wouldn’t sell any.
The Defender, of what? An icon of British design ineptitude?
The Discovery, of where? Yet another place to get it fixed?
The Mechanic Hunter?
Whatever.
I just phoned for a progress report so he tells me the engine is in bits and the crankshaft is a gonner. Brilliant. Just tack on another one hundred thousand Colona’s to the guestimate nightmare. That’s two hundred and fifty quid at the current rate but luckily I for one have stopped counting. This is an age old story rendered slightly more complex by language difficulties, meaning he can’t determine just how extensive my knowledge of mechanics actually is, so the crankshaft announcement could be a wild shot in the dark. “Just how many inked-in spanners is this British bloke anyway? Try for two, this could be Christmas, I could flog him the shaft that’s been under my porch for twenty years.
I do know something about mechanics, though clearly not enough to have even considered adopting a Land Rover. And I have the treasured Haynes manual to fill in some of the grey areas. In section 1-4 Mr Haynes tells me you cannot do anything with a crankshaft while the engine is still in the vehicle, and apparently he hasn’t taken it out.
I’m compelled to use the term vehicle here for want of something more appropriate. The Land Rover seems to find itself beyond normal classification, as you can hardly call it a car, or a jeep or a truck or any fun to drive while it handles like a threshing machine. So vehicle it will have to be.
What a rarity it would be to see a Land Rover with ambulance written on it, or anything else for that matter connected to emergency services. “So sorry we couldn’t attend your medical emergency for three and a half days but what with diesel in the oil sump and inner tubes unable or unwilling to hold air under pressure; you know how it is.”
At exactly thirty six miles per hour superheated oil rises vertically from the motor with enough force to drive it through rivets on the bonnet and from thence all over the windscreen. This event is described by all the mechanics I have hired to remedy the disaster as a physical impossibility, as there is simply no avenue of escape for even superheated oil. But the evidence is there to see, dripping from my Land Rover. Having dumped so much of the stuff onto the tarmac in the Pali supermarket car park it can no longer support the mass times the force due to gravity of a lightly loaded shopping trolley let alone a Land Rover. This catastrophic oil loss is simply not possible in a Cartesian world where this is this and therefore that is that, notwithstanding the fact that my engine is incapable of generating enough pressure to force its oil supply anywhere.
You see how I’m now forced to ponder and then verify the psychic lives of the machines we create at the expense of my sanity because this event only occurs whilst I’m at the helm and the bonnet is in the traditional closed position. Change one simple condition and my oil stays where it belongs, doing very little, wallowing in its sump. Quite clearly my Land Rover is attempting to broadcast a message to its current owner with more than a tad of gusto. But what could it be and what’s the urgency? “I’ve solved Zeno’s paradox you stupid git so why do you insist using me as a form of personal transport?”
As for our Land Rover he’s had the thing for ten days now and oddly enough I’ve been feeling much less tense, sleeping a lot better and feeling spiritually restored. Could this be the famous self-induced diesel Land Rover stress syndrome? The clinical unwillingness to accept one has spent and is still spending and will forever spend every cent earned until all eternity or until one pushes the whole sorry life episode over a dramatic high cliff.
That was yesterday and I simply couldn’t face going over there to pick it up, let him keep the key for a few more days; it’s like carrying an anvil around anyway. What could he be doing that’s going to cost so much? Regardless of his efforts it’s still going to be a Land Rover that smells of rotting upholstery because the roof fails to keep out rain, with a gear lever that flies out of third to crack the kneecap of anyone sitting in the middle seat. With a steering box that refuses to contain its ball bearings in its worm drive. I just can’t imagine, so only a perverse sense of curiosity will propel me to have a look. So I phoned him instead. He say’s he’s fixed everything that was wrong before. I said great; before what? Leaving a Solihull factory en route to Costa Rica? He said he’s stopped diesel fuel getting into the oil sump which would have solved everything except for having had diesel in the oil sump it has worn out the pistons. So when I show up on Monday with a bag of cash only to find it still belches smoke like an eco catastrophyst I’m going to say “You don’t seem to have done very much.” And generally infer he’s a lousy mechanic, even though he’s probably performed his job to perfection.
I hung up the phone, lit a few candles, opened my little bag of bleached chicken bones and the sacred Haynes oracle. It seems I have four pistons, all made of a light alloy and each one featuring a swirl-inducing recess in the crown. A light alloy….hmmmm, that sounds like a key that only deepens the mystery as to how an aluminium Land Rover with four light alloy pistons still manages to weigh about thirty tons. Perhaps my swirl-inducing recesses (whatever they are) are filled with some exotic metal of near infinite mass which would explain why I have to rally an entire neighbourhood to help bump-start the stupid thing when it refuses to start.
Maybe it just requires a new set of piston rings, it hardly mattes anymore, either task is the same number of inked-in spanners and the same number of man hours, but here’s the tragic reality. “If new pistons or their rings have been fitted your engine should be considered as new and therefore it should be run-in at a reduced speed for the first half million miles.” Brilliant, that means another ten years of Roving before I can stoke it back up to a maximum velocity of thirty seven miles per hour. Laugh? I must pay a fortune for the privilege of travelling even slower than before.
Sunday, (formerly a day off) I sit on the porch looking at ripening avocado’s in the tree. We also have palms, a lemon tree, a banana…thing, Hibiscus bushes and therefore lots of humming birds and at the centre of it all, a pitiful arctic white diesel Land Rover. I prefer to watch a sloth making its way along an electricity cable that runs along our country lane out front but as usual my Land Rover demands attention. The front bumper is out of line, rising a good inch on the right hand side. A bumper clearly inspired by any of the larger structural elements of the Forth rail bridge I know instinctively this angle must be caused by something expensive. Sure enough, driving along our rough lanes with a steel universal beam bolted to the front has split the chassis all the way from bottom to top. I’m only four or five bumps from complete shear. There’s a bloke not far from here with a portable mig welder who would simply hook his wires onto the overhead cables, use a jack and the weight of the bumper to close the gap and weld it shut but I’m worried about incinerating the sloth before it gets where it’s going. That is not it, that is not pronoia.
I remember Agartha. I remember Cutting The Ties That Bind Us. I remember Reinforcing Floors To Carry Spiritual Loading. I remember my little Toyota Tercel, a name so reminiscent of a drain cleaning fluid, in the space of three years all it suffered was one puncture. The time has come, once again, to reclaim my life from those jovial boys back in Solihull, but how do I dispose of the ugliest object ever devised by the mind of man without falling foul of Friends of the Earth?
They don’t have scrap yards in Costa Rica, having elected to remain a nation that will never suffocate under its own rubbish mountain and I’m certain my Rover could not struggle all the way to Nicaragua next door. The next day I received my letter along with two hundred others to informed us all that the foundation would sink without trace without this months wages, without compensation, without nada, so I sold the Useless Rover for small change, packed-up my trusty DeWalt radial arm saw and we flew south to Ecuador.
Quito International Airport is aptly named because it’s still in Quito. We lived in an apartment which overlooked it, along with a few million others


`email John << back to index page


-