The days of dad tinkering on the family car on the driveway are long gone, says TGTV’s Sam Philip
For much of my childhood, my dad was just a pair of legs.
To clarify, he had a torso, and arms, and a head – still does, for that matter – but for much of the Eighties and Nineties, they were hidden beneath a Ford Sierra or Orion, or a beige Volvo estate. A pair of oil-stained jeans, surrounded by a scatter of tools and half-drunk mugs of tea.
My dad wasn’t a mechanic. He had a day job, but when he wasn’t doing his day job, he was mending cars. Not a hobby as such, more penny pinching. He suffered a morbid aversion to paying someone else to do something he could do himself, even if doing it himself involved a fortnight of research into the intricacies of Citroen wiring looms, the purchase of some specialist equipment from a shady chap with a Latvian phone number,and, thereafter, a series of increasingly violent electrocutions accompanied by increasingly violent swearwords.
Man, the shocks. My dad treated electrocutions not as a hazard, but as a thumbs-up from physics, proof that he was really getting to the nub of the problem. He also had an uncanny ability to electrocute himself when carrying out a task that didn’t obviously involve electricity in any way. He’d often wander in from, say, performing a simple oil change, sporting a wild-eyed look and smelling of burnt chips, muttering, “Now that was a lively one.”
His sole concession to safety was a pair of rusty ramps that would periodically buckle under the weight of the car, leaving him pinned beneath, somehow unscathed, whistling patiently until a family member might arrive with a trolley jack. But somehow he always got the thing going: after a couple of days of banging and swearing, there would eventually emerge a triumphant “aha!”, followed by the phut-phut-phrrrr of an engine firing to life, then the faint zap of a small, celebratory electrocution.
He wasn’t alone. Most men of my dad’s age spent most o
