Paul in NZ
21st September 2004, 18:03
OK.... You all sitting comfortably?
This story is a mish mash of stuff.... Some of it's even true...
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The Home Mechanic
There is nothing like the warm feeling you get from doing your own repairs and servicing….
Winter in the southern town where I grew up was often a dreary old affair. True, there were regularly bright, clear sunny days after a hard frost. But you could always count on a couple of fortnights where all it seemed to do was rain, sleet, rain, interspersed with drizzle, mist and if you were lucky, snow. The grayness of the old stone buildings seemed to meld into the grey dreary skies blanketing the city with a depressing dampness and an ever pervading cold. During these times, the prime concern of all the dwellers of our slightly ‘down at heel’ neighborhood was keeping dry, warm and trying to prevent the rising damp in our threadbare walls from totally taking over the whole house.
Such are the teenage joys of a student life…..
Of course on the up side! We didn’t need the fridge to keep the beer cold!
We were all keen motorcyclists in our flat. Being poor students we naturally owned the most rundown collection of 2 wheeled transport ever seen. On a good day you could have almost made a decent bike from the lot of them!!
Mark, the longest resident and acknowledged ‘leader of the flat’ had the ‘sunny’ room, Andy had the ‘coldest’ room and as the second longest resident of the flat I had managed to grab the old ‘front’ room as my bedroom. While the bigger front room was difficult to heat it had the advantage of its own open fireplace. Being an old house with big rooms and us having no structure worthy of the title garage, (well not after Mark drove his 39 Ford through the back of it after fixing the brakes) our motorcycles lived inside the house with us. I could lie in bed in my massive bedroom and watch the yellow firelight flickering in the hearth and reflecting on the remnants of chrome of whatever old wreck was currently being persuaded to carry me about the city. Pink Floyd would be warbling away on the trusty Three in One Stereo system, the lusty smell of 90W gear oil and a small heap of tools. I thought that life could be no finer than this!
To maintain this glorious state of bliss, obtaining things to burn (at a reasonable price) had become quite an obsession. Old furniture, trees, beer crates, anything, as long as it was dry (ish) cheap and combustible, onto the fire it went. On a typical cold winters evening, around the smoking, smoldering pile in the hearth we would huddle, shivering into the traditional motley collection of old armchairs and sofas (non-combustible) found in student flats and turgid dungeons the world over.
Keeping the bikes inside led to some pretty interesting party accidents and some remarkable memories. Like the night I finished a top end rebuild on my girlfriends Triumph while my flat mate was wooing his new girlfriend in his bedroom. She was not amused when I fired it up for a test run and I guess the open pipes were only romantic to other petrol heads! Still I suppose there are not many people that have been run down by an electric blue Triumph Speed Twin in their hallway! Amid the screaming, she tried to blame me but the reality was that she did rush out into the hallway unexpectedly and without indicating!!
These being all older machines, there were also some other fairly interesting goings on, sometimes with dire consequences!
One particularly cold winters evening Mark decided that it was time to give his disgusting T500 ‘Titan’ Suzuki a tune up. Normally this would be a grand idea but since Mark had about as much common sense as a turnip when it came to these matter there were bound to be problems. (This is not to say Mark was any worse off in this respect to the rest of us either.)
This story is a mish mash of stuff.... Some of it's even true...
-----------------------
The Home Mechanic
There is nothing like the warm feeling you get from doing your own repairs and servicing….
Winter in the southern town where I grew up was often a dreary old affair. True, there were regularly bright, clear sunny days after a hard frost. But you could always count on a couple of fortnights where all it seemed to do was rain, sleet, rain, interspersed with drizzle, mist and if you were lucky, snow. The grayness of the old stone buildings seemed to meld into the grey dreary skies blanketing the city with a depressing dampness and an ever pervading cold. During these times, the prime concern of all the dwellers of our slightly ‘down at heel’ neighborhood was keeping dry, warm and trying to prevent the rising damp in our threadbare walls from totally taking over the whole house.
Such are the teenage joys of a student life…..
Of course on the up side! We didn’t need the fridge to keep the beer cold!
We were all keen motorcyclists in our flat. Being poor students we naturally owned the most rundown collection of 2 wheeled transport ever seen. On a good day you could have almost made a decent bike from the lot of them!!
Mark, the longest resident and acknowledged ‘leader of the flat’ had the ‘sunny’ room, Andy had the ‘coldest’ room and as the second longest resident of the flat I had managed to grab the old ‘front’ room as my bedroom. While the bigger front room was difficult to heat it had the advantage of its own open fireplace. Being an old house with big rooms and us having no structure worthy of the title garage, (well not after Mark drove his 39 Ford through the back of it after fixing the brakes) our motorcycles lived inside the house with us. I could lie in bed in my massive bedroom and watch the yellow firelight flickering in the hearth and reflecting on the remnants of chrome of whatever old wreck was currently being persuaded to carry me about the city. Pink Floyd would be warbling away on the trusty Three in One Stereo system, the lusty smell of 90W gear oil and a small heap of tools. I thought that life could be no finer than this!
To maintain this glorious state of bliss, obtaining things to burn (at a reasonable price) had become quite an obsession. Old furniture, trees, beer crates, anything, as long as it was dry (ish) cheap and combustible, onto the fire it went. On a typical cold winters evening, around the smoking, smoldering pile in the hearth we would huddle, shivering into the traditional motley collection of old armchairs and sofas (non-combustible) found in student flats and turgid dungeons the world over.
Keeping the bikes inside led to some pretty interesting party accidents and some remarkable memories. Like the night I finished a top end rebuild on my girlfriends Triumph while my flat mate was wooing his new girlfriend in his bedroom. She was not amused when I fired it up for a test run and I guess the open pipes were only romantic to other petrol heads! Still I suppose there are not many people that have been run down by an electric blue Triumph Speed Twin in their hallway! Amid the screaming, she tried to blame me but the reality was that she did rush out into the hallway unexpectedly and without indicating!!
These being all older machines, there were also some other fairly interesting goings on, sometimes with dire consequences!
One particularly cold winters evening Mark decided that it was time to give his disgusting T500 ‘Titan’ Suzuki a tune up. Normally this would be a grand idea but since Mark had about as much common sense as a turnip when it came to these matter there were bound to be problems. (This is not to say Mark was any worse off in this respect to the rest of us either.)