The mid-life crisis has arrived early. It took me by surprise. I woke up, made coffee and at the very point I would usually be thinking, ‘Oo, I must put the recycling out,’ I thought, ‘Oo, I must buy a Porsche.’
How can this happen? I hate flash cars. My motoring history includes two small Peugeots, a Renault 5 with flower transfers down the side and a broken accelerator pedal, and a fire-engine red Ford Fiesta called Bunbury, after the non-existent character in The Importance of Being Earnest.
It just shows how powerful is the urge to cling in vain to the remnants of one’s youth. One minute I was happily pootling down the A3 in my battered 206 listening to the best of Barbra Streisand, the next I was frantically searching through hundreds of shiny, boy racer Carrera 4s on ExchangeandMart.com. I narrowed it down to two, a navy blue one and a green one, both convertibles, very flash. Now I just had to find a reason.
I rang my car expert friend Stephen. If anyone knew a good reason to buy a Porsche, it would be him. He gave me a long lecture about how the old air-cooled 2.2s model built in the Seventies was the truly great and iconic 911 in its purest incarnation. Hello? I’m not actually interested in Porsches. I’m interested in life expectancy extenders.
I rang a girlfriend who pronounced the project psychologically disturbing after pointing out that my ex drove a Porsche. It was hopeless. There was no good reason to buy one.
So I had to settle for a bad reason. Happily, there were lots of those. If I buy a Porsche, younger men will find me irresistible; I don’t have children, and it is the solemn duty of childless people to keep the sports car industry going; you only live once; and why shouldn’t I have what I want? All really, really bad reasons and absolutely perfect for my purposes.
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