Fast cars, photographs, and the public service dreams of train spotters
I am spending the night in the village of Alderley Edge in Cheshire, a few miles south of Manchester.
My wife and I arrived early afternoon after dropping our son in Manchester and went for a late lunch in the high street. This is a wealthy area; the sort of place where hedge fund managers and property developers settle if they don’t need to be in London more than a day or so a week. Oh, and professional footballers.
With the money comes cars.
I know little about cars but I recognise the thrum and chug of something expensive as it roars between pedestrian crossings. This village high street, although quite long, is not a road for rash acceleration but it is a road for heavy revving — the automobile equivalent of teenage first date sex.
So far, so boring. I’m still grateful for indicators that don’t stick out the side of the car. I remember the existence of the choke — to be used on cold mornings with the expert touch of a safe-cracker.
But in Alderley Edge we encountered a strange by-product of high street car porn in the form of young would-be paparazzi. Papacarzi? At intervals along the road, groups of youths — ranging perhaps from 14 to 18 and male — stood holding either smartphones or, in some cases, expensive digital cameras and snapped the passing cars.
Not all the cars, of course. They were very selective. No VWs or average Mercs took up valuable storage in the cameras; the lenses were pointed only towards Ferraris, Lambos, and an Audi R8 that trundled widely past us we sat at lunch. The rest of the cars I failed to identify because I had grown bored by the procession. I knew which cars would be photographed simply by the timbre of the engine assorted V6s and V8s tried to find the deepest note of the afternoon.
When I went train spotting as a boy I never aspired to own a Deltic, for example. Many of my fellow train spotters had dreams around trains but they tended to be about working for British Rail and playing trains for real. One of my friends actually went into operational research and concentrated on analysing and improving train timetables. Paradise for a train nerd.
I suspect the young men taking photos of fast expensive cars are, given the environment in which these cars are being paraded, dreaming of owning similar cars themselves.
This is probably the aspiration that the Tories and the Labour right are so keen to talk about. We should all aspire to own impractical cars while public transport is denigrated and defunded.
Or is a kid taking a photo of a fast car in his spare time on a Saturday afternoon just a kid taking a photo of a fast car?
