Fast Car called me…. APOLOGIES for absence!

11th August 2023 Adam Rayner

So there I was basking like a walrus in my lovely old cast iron bath.. Built in 1933, suburbia far better than Harry Potter’s, although we are just down the road from the Warner Bros studio tour. But I digress.. the mobile I was idly looking at AITA shorts on Facebook upon, rang in my hand! I was startled and nearly dropped the phone in the bath. It was my old mucker Jules Truss, a long time later from his being a crucial cog at Fast Car magazine. Nowadays, the big online media company called Kelsey, have titles as diverse as STUFF, Carpology and Fast Car. And Jules is Head of Content on Fastcar.co.uk.

All this time later, Google has finally addressed my anger at the pretend online reviewer!

AT LAST, rather than any benefit in SEO terms being garnered by copying tech data stuff and pasting it into your own website…. say, just the catalogue words, there has now been a change in how online review content shall be valued. Goo have worked out how to tell the real thing, and issued a set of guidelines that are hilariously patronising to a hardcore old school grizzled git of a reviewer like myself, with a dozen print magazine credits to my name. HECK, I WAS THE EXCHANGE AND MART JOKE KILLER! Yep, there used to be a joke about being a ‘magazine writer’ while not really being hired for any writing skill. The joke was that they “‘Wrote for Exchange & Mart.”

Get this.. in their 140 year print history until that day, I was that first actual writer. Their advertisers were selling huge swathes of Max Power style parts and things. They figured a small editorial section was worth doing. And they asked me. I am prouder of doing that than being in the Lear Jet seat back magazine called International High Flyer! (L9931 and then L9934 on the spine of my copies.. I did two!) They went online only in 2009. /braggingmode/

Anyway, Jules asked if I fancied doing some stuff for them.. and I have been cranking out heaps of copy carefully written to be sentences under 20 words long and no lumps bigger than 300 words. It wasn’t too hard to get a grip of. My little site here is kinda niche, thus I am not so fretty about such rule adherence but they do know what they are doing.

I was told that one of my pieces was ranking No1. in the UK for Car Audio. That’s a thrill for me, and I have been working ever so hard… but I have neglected this site and this is a proper apology. I am sorry! It has been the longest break from the Tamagotchi-grade pursuit of proper website content feeding and fettling that I have ever taken.

I will admit that I have absolutely been loving working proper hard for deadlines again, though, talking the great and the good of the Car Audio scene once more. Just hearing the gentle pleasure in the voices of a couple of old mates. Blokes who have been in the trade as long as I have but haven’t had a nag with me in forever, it feels! That and a rekindle with the boss of PR at Sony, who I have known again, literally for decades..

I have mostly been using sourced images but for the Speed Cameras Explained piece, I went and snapped a slew of my own.. and made a video. A slice of lesser activity on the channel has also meant fewer views than before, but it’s not bad. Do go check it out, you can hear that I hates them like Gollum hates Baggineses!

There is a slew of my stuff on there, some still labelled with me as doing the words but ‘Authored’ by the website bod who put it up, instead. I really don’t have the ego to get all upset about the thus sideways-crediting for some of it.

In the meanwhile, I have these come up if you put my name in their site search box.