Editorial: MARCH…. WE GOT STUFF COOKING!

Writing somewhat late in the month, I find myself in an emotional turmoil for a change! Yes, I get excited about things and do speak my mind and even get into trouble, neck-deep sometimes but it comes from the heart. And today I want to talk about change and the new and the old. And something that drives me as hard as it ever did – injustice!

The change is about a whole new website, an epic labour of pure web-genius. We have had three different content management systems in our time since I joined the then Talk Audio and now, well there is a huge evolution a -coming and yet all I can do, is “Tell you that I am GOING to tell you.” Yet huge and profoundly cunning and clever stuff has been going on in the background, with Web-Jabberwocky slayers, welding Vorpal blades. It is already looking bloody lovely and proving a browsing power WAY beyond the system I am used to. I am about to become much more able to time-vampire you all to hell with tech nostalgia too easy to find.

The ‘old’ was an outfit called Advanced Vehicle Alarms of the Deptford Bridge Road, presided over by Larry ‘The Lock’. A place that had mad punters who put TWO eighteens in the boot of a Granada in a huge box and was also in a less than salubrious part of London, 30 years ago. So Larry became the expert at serious eff-you-thieves-grade vehicle security. Slam locks, bloody great plates of steel, or dead locks or all of it. He made it easier to open the frickin’ ROOF than try to force a door. Now, they are in a posher place doing awesome work on a big scale.

And the new thrust for me in future has to be OEM systems (stuff that comes with the car) and the new FORS safety and security kit for trucks. I wanna see ugly delivery geezer drivers get emo when they see what AVA have done to their truck. I also want the Lamborghini they look likely to be doing soon! But I had no reason to nag Bill, the next generation at AVA, 30 years after I was a rep to him for Electrosystems, selling wires and widgets.

Now I do.

I have a new chum, a good lad who is a demon shot in the catapult scene. He can make stuff with awesome skill and goes deerstalking in Scotland with his dad. Last time he went, the estate, realising he was a yoof, with vast talents and pleasant manner, tried to hire him!

But he is a trainee plumber..nuff said! (Proper living to be made, from a pukka trade.) So, John goes to college some days and one one such day, his beloved Ford Ranger truck got violated and all his tools and test stuff was stolen. Tool theft makes me ANGRY! The lowest act apart from burgling presents from under Christmas trees. Vile nasty bastards. Poor lad was so dispirited, unhappy and hurt deep in the psyche, that he was ready to give up years of work and just leave. He said he felt he had been slapped back to day one and could not work. His friends and family have helped him get back on his feet with the bare bones of kit to get him working again. And that is lovely.

But I am raging. How can these scum look themselves in the eye in a mirror when shaving their weaselly faces? (AND WHY does Facey allow ‘marketplace’ adverts of so very many whole stashes of tools? I think they MUST be stolen goods, over and over, in my opinion. It is mayhem, that and fake watches! DON’T trust it!).

So I am working with AVA’s Bill F, he who breathes upon Italian Hypercars, to see what we can do to to enable John once more to grow closer back in lurve with his Pride & Joy truck. Without fearing that it’ll be violated again so easily. He admitted when I asked him, that he would have been less upset if a nasty person had simply slapped his face. (Although I wouldn’t recommend that, he does weird martial arts stuff involving hurting things. Things made of wood. I think it is called ‘Perpangular Facial Rearrangement’, in Japanese.)

The days are at last drawing out once more and after the evil weather we have had, I was delighted to see a Blackbird basking in the sun, right there on the A41 M25 spur roundabout near the Harry Potter thing in Watford. SUN at last.

Drive carefully, enjoy your tunes, don’t get nicked. Lock your car.

Adam Rayner On Line Editor.