`Old Man in an Old Car’ – Out Now

May 20, 2024 by Doctor Vernon Coleman

My new book `Old Man in an Old Car is now available. It’s not about covid or global warming. It is, however, an entertaining and educational read. Below, we’re printing the Preface from the book so that you can see what it’s about.

Preface
This began as a book about buying an old car as one last absurd adventure. But I realised that the old car was a perfect analogy not just for what happens to us and how we change as we get older, but also how we should, perhaps, respond to those changes.

So, for example, the car’s clock and the petrol gauge don’t work. Should I get them investigated, diagnosed and repaired (at enormous expense) or should I put up with the faults? If I take the car to the garage (and only a specialist garage can look after old, classic cars) it will be away and out of use for weeks on end.

I’m a little deaf and losing my hair and I get out of breath if I walk up steep hills. I also wobble more than I’d like. Should I see endless doctors, have tests and investigations done and take tablets which probably cause the A to Z of side effects? Or should I just put up with these annoyances, and regard them as just a part of growing old? (I see people who are ten years older than I am running marathons and I am in awe. How did they age so well? Did they live on lentils and pastoral evocations?)

Looking at an old car confirms that progress often isn’t progress at all, though we are told it always is. Are electric windows necessarily better than windows you wind up and down? The former go wrong more often than the latter. How much effort does it take to operate a window winder? When a windscreen wiper blade needs replacing, is it better to replace just the blade or the whole wiper mechanism?

Are modern cars too complicated for their own (and our) good? Is the progress we are told we must applaud, always ‘progress’?

And so this book about an old car changed course and somehow it became a philosophy book, a commonplace book, a book about things it took me a lifetime to learn, and a book which contains as much (or more) about the reflections of an old man, and about how our world has changed, as about the old car. It is a book of observations and memories; it is a book about the myriad ways in which the world has changed (mainly or exclusively for the worst I’m afraid) and is now virtually unrecognisable. Comparing today’s world with the world a few decades ago is like comparing a seven course meal at Maxims with a packet of Hula Hoops. It’s all food but they’re very different. (I should, perhaps, explain, en passant, that a commonplace book, popular in the 19th century, was a volume in which were collected thoughts, sayings and anecdotes which the author thought worth saving and sharing.)

The world seems different when you get older and that’s just because it is different. It was ever thus. Everything changes.

But it’s different this time.

It’s different because everything is changing far more speedily than ever before.

But it’s also different because everything old is now dismissed as clapped out and useless. And that means people as much as 20th century mobile phones.

Other civilisations may have revered their elderly, and learnt from them, but our civilisation regards elderly machinery as fit only for the scrapyard and elderly people as suitable candidates for euthanasia. Do not resuscitate. Do not pass Go. Do not collect £200.

This isn’t a book full of nostalgia and sentimental reflections studied through the flattering lens of time and the deceptively reassuring retrospectoscope. It’s a look at what we’ve lost, what we ended up with and where we’re going now – in a world dominated and controlled by distant rentiers who regard megalomania as a virtue not a sin. And it is an exploration of the ageing processes which bewilder and astound everyone who lives long enough to discover the mental and physical cost of getting old. And it’s about an old car.

When writing fiction I’ve often found that the characters decide what is going to happen to them, and just take me along for the ride. That may be a cliché but clichés are clichés because they’re often true. So, for example my novel ‘Mrs Caldicot’s Cabbage War’ was a very different book when I first sat down to write it. My intention was that Mrs Caldicot and her chums would rob a bank. (The idea was original then.) But Mrs Caldicot took over and made it clear that she didn’t want to rob a bank. And so the book (and the subsequent movie) took a different direction.

The same thing happened to me as I wrote this book.

Authors and publishers are required to categorise their books. But I have no idea how this book should be filed. Is it an autobiography? Is it a book of philosophy? Is it a book of essays or humorous pieces? An old-fashioned and rushed book shop assistant would probably put it on the shelf headed ‘Motor Car Maintenance’. Maybe it should be filed under ‘Rambling’. Or would that merely result in a lot of walkers being disappointed?

I can, however, tell you this.

In 1782 and 1789, the two parts of Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s book ‘Les Confessions’ were published and are now widely recognised as the first modern autobiography. (Rousseau died in 1778, of course. His book was published posthumously and the two parts were later combined as one.)

The book begins: ‘This is what I have done and this is what has been done to me. If on occasions I have added some innocent embellishment, it has been only to fill the odd defect of character. Sometimes I may have taken for a fact what was no more than a probability, but I have never put down what I knew to be false.’

I stand with M. Rousseau on this.

Vernon Coleman, Bilbury, Devon

May 2024

NOTE
Vernon Coleman’s new book `Old Man in an Old Car’ is available in hardcover format from the bookshop on www.vernoncoleman.com