Classics Dept.
Building 20, Main Quad,
Stanford University,
CA 94305-2080
I am developing my own wiki. How exciting!
Email: dplatt@stanford.edu
You may also be interested in David Platt's Work Journal.
Inspired by Rebecca Daly's entry, I'll slowly add a few notes about the car in the picture above. "Mini" was my first car, a one-liter automatic Austin Mini City E from 1987. I owned the car between 1997 and 1998. During this time, I realized one reason not to buy another Mini as long as I live: she spent far too long in the workshop. Mysterious and unlocatable oil and radiator leaks, a wrecked head gasket, a dead alternator, an unfixable leak from the left door into the passenger footwell, and a rusting sub-frame were the banes of my existence (I was living in Wales in a particularly wet winter). Mini met her demise on the motorway between Lancaster and Oldham, in the northwest of England -- a victim of the radiator leak and a cooked engine. The car that my then-wife and I had spent £950 was sold for scrap for £50, as towing it back home would have been prohibitively expensive.
No, I don't want to talk about it.
Still, despite all this, I had actually passed my driving test so that I could drive a Mini rather than any other car. Whether this is because of some strange masochistic tendencies on my part, or the effects of the cultural associations we find in car cultures, I leave to the judgement of the reader.
Other characteristics of the car:
- In the spirit of the car's designer, Sir Alec Issigonis, there was neither a radio nor cassette player in the car (he hated them, believing that they distracted you from the business of driving).
- On cold mornings, I would have to use a cigarette lighter to defrost the door locks.
- In the very back of the car, you can see my one piece of customization: an inflatable, squeaky, American Gladiator style baton that was given to me by a friend of a friend at my Bachelor party ("Stag Night" in UK English).
- There was never any room in the boot/ trunk for anything else other than the spare tire/ tyre, bottle of water for the radiator, can of engine oil, and the ridiculously large repair kit that we had to carry around with us.
- Note that in the picture, I am wearing "wellies" (AKA Wellington boots). This is because I have just finished bailing out the water from the passenger footwell. Yes, really.
