When I was a teenager I once wrote to Jim’ll Fix It to ask Jim whether he could fix it for me to flog Joan Bakewell around the BBC2 studios, but for some reason my letter was never acknowledged. Fantasy is an odd business, if only in the sense that it rarely gets fulfilled. When you put your numbers down on the Euromillions lottery ticket you are not playing silly ego-games with yourself. That McLaren F1 and a Porsche Turbo for the missus are what you might call potential realities. I remember when my brother packed his bag in the Eighties and went off to sea, well, we never knew when he’d be back again. When he finally did show up nearly a year later it was approximately 4.48pm on a Saturday afternoon. He flung the door open just as my old granddad was studying the teleprinter. I was dumbstruck, yet the old boy just says “Shut it will ya, I’ve got two draws already!” I mean, how deep can you sink? No, a real fantasy involves so much more than realisable things. It’s the twisted dreams that are really the straightest.
So if and when that fairy Godmother ever appears to me I will make the following request. “I want unlimited access to the past and the future where and when I choose”. This is what true fantasy is all about and presents unlimited possibilities. Imagine the reaction of Cro-Magnon man to the brusque arrival of me and the Gimp in the Commer. Even better, imagine their delight after they’d thankfully shoved a flint axe through the Gimp’s leather helmet to stop his daft racket. But before I take you on a cosmic tour, I’d better reiterate I’ve always had a love/hate relationship with the Commer, mainly because you can never love a vehicle properly if you know sod all about the way it functions. So every now and then you get the feeling that this lump of metal you’re working under is just being plain awkward, when really it’s you who is being plain dumb. I mean, you can’t argue with that Pirsig fellow when he says the big burst in modern mans’ bladder is that he can’t see much further than his own windscreen. And so it is, the nearside rear brake shoes are contaminated by fluid leaking from the slave cylinder which I repaired about six years ago. And I can neither get new seals or the ghastly little tool needed to extract the bastards, nor indeed the enthusiasm to do much about it except dream. So frankly, I have nothing left but my fantasy of time travel.
Bleary eyed I set off in the Commer down the A23 departing from Newhaven on the cosmic ferry and onto the roads of medieval France, thence to Agincourt. Henry V polishes his Bedford CA Dormobile the night before battle. I shade my eyes from the glint of the falling sun sparkling from the Solvol tin.
“Jesus” I exclaim, “I didn’t know they were so old?”
Henry says nothing.
“Got any rear brake seals and an extractor tool for a 1969 Commer mate?”
Still Henry says nothing.
“Look mate” I persist, “If you were engaged upon a track across the highways of the past and future and infinite dimensions and that, you might appreciate the difficulty in pulling up sharp without new brake seals. I fancy a chat with W O Bentley tomorrow so can you help me?”
Henry pauses from his polishing and suggests I try the local Peugeot Talbot dealers. Funny guy. The search continues.
Next stop 1066. Harold pulls the arrow from his eye and burst into laughter at my metal companion. Funny, I think, that’s how everyone used to react in the 21st century too. John the Baptist isn’t much help either. “Sorry Guv” he says, “but if you were subject to Roman imperialism you’d realise spares are hard to come by too. Fiat Iveco have monopolised the market round here.”
I get no dice from Attilla the Hun, sat inside the kitchenette of his Ford Transit Mk1 coachbuilt. He just grins through the window (syphilis has not yet caused him to grimace) and draws up a large grolly from his flaring nostrils to spit green up the Commer’s flanks. “We want no American Chrysler rubbish round here man” he booms, his voice charged with the tones of super-ego. “And tell Clarkson he was right about SUVs”. It’s obvious this demigod has a set a brake seals but that he has little intention of helping me out. I try one last approach. “Hey dude, this was designed before Chrysler took over Rootes in ‘65”. But Attila is already silhouetted against the sunset of time long gone. Now I believe all I was told about the 2 litre Pinto fitted to those Transits.
Location Carthage. Hannibal stands next to an Austin FJ. “You didn’t believe all that crap about elephants did you? Look son, let’s set the record straight. It was a pure and simple case of over the Alps we go and all BMC light commercials are sh*t ‘ot. Me and the boys, we did it all by pure machinery. We weren’t interested in speed, just as long as we did it all before winter set in. As it was, that didn’t quite work out, but er… we brought along Bradex Easistart”.
Tsar Nicholas and Rasputin chug past in a Russian GAZelle Cargo. I rub my chin – must be one of the earlier Transit MkII copies. Who was it wrote revolutions improve the quality of a country’s industry? Perhaps Lenin never drove a Mercedes Sprinter?
Enough. As dusk falls on some millennium or other (a cosmic piss in the wind in the no-time of infinity) I decide if I’m ever going to get them seals fixed I’m gonna have to get them via a more surreal experience. “One is always nearer by not keeping still” (what a dumb quote). Time to witness creation itself, seals or no seals.
I drive down the icicle linking Earth to the Universe. Warm galactic winds caress my face, the no-breeze of space. I’m drawn into the blue argon of a quasar as the entrance of the pod draws open. A new taste of wet energy enables a thought-sensory light-ray to beam in search of brake seals. I sense a void ahead. Three thousand blinks should see me there. Immersed in quarks I blindly drift into the nucleus of a pink cloud. Optical pain races out as the cornea winces at the acid fumes. Oceans of aqueous humour pour outwards forming a star trail of exhaust fumes and electron particles. They grind through my optic nerves. Assassinating the suns and moons of existence, blindness cheats the eye of reflections and the lid is placed on the dustbin dreams of life. I am welcomed into the no-being of blackness. Madness cheats me of a solution. My plot is destroyed. There are no seals; there is no God.
Having doffed both cosmic and surreal garments I stand naked as before. Let me reiterate, the essence of everyday fantasy is that it’s potentially realisable – so it ain’t worth a w**k. Don’t dream about a fantasy, just go out and pawn your mum’s passport. If you want a real Naked Lunch, what can I suggest? Perhaps I better try Halfords?
