This car has got such a cute little bonnet, with a compact, tidy engine. Spotlessly clean, no evidence of dirt apart from dust which is to be expected as the car is under 3 years old.
Fiddling around in there, with G's help when checking the battery water level, reminded me of when I was small and I spent a lot of time playing in the garage while Dad worked on the Merc.
He would spend the better part of a lot of days bent over the engine, his hands covered in that unshiftable black that becomes part of your life the moment you touch an engine. He was always wearing 'working clothes': a scruffy, well-worn jersey over a faded, almost see-through shirt and dated, unfashionable trousers from the 70s.
I was always fascinated by what he was doing. Just looking at the engine, knowing what was what, and how the different parts worked, referring to the detailed circuit diagrams in his bible, 'the Merc book' as it was known in our family.
It was a book I loved looking through, despite it not having many pictures that were satisfying to look at - it was mostly engine and parts photos, with how-to series' of photos of boring detail - because it had pictures of Our Car. Not specifically our car, of course, but our car's siblings who had had a successful career in modelling.
The knowledge Dad had of that car was immeasurable, and yet he still wasn't able to know everything. He struggled for days on end, trying to take something apart, or put something back together, or getting a specific part out of the car, so that he could order a replacement. More often than not, he'd take the part to the spares shop, they'd order one for him, he'd bring it home only to find "bugger it, it's the wrong part!!".
The poor car was a W123 series 240D, a supposedly stable, faultless, troublefree edition of Mercedes Benz, but we suspected that our one was the scapegoat, bearing all the problems that normally would have been distributed fairly between all the cars of its pedigree. Eventually, as the car aged, Dad (who was the usual driver) had to get used to so many oddities of the car.
Every morning before taking us to school, he'd sit in the car, counting. The glowplug-ready light on the dashboard broke at some stage, so he'd have to turn the ignition, count a certain number of seconds and then turn the key, otherwise the car simply would not start.
Another odd thing we got used to for a while was the car not switching off at the ignition. Seeing how much trouble it took to replace the thing, it's no wonder Dad delayed fixing it for a while and during that time, the only way to switch the car off was to force it to stall. It made for amusing stops!
One last quirk I'd like to mention (rather than bore you with every single one), was the car's dislike for cold nights. It would refuse to start the next morning, so Dad took to covering up the bonnet with blankets! I forget what the fault was, and I do remember the car not doing that permanently, so it must have been one of the many things Dad fixed.
I guess this blog post is a sentimental ramble, and I think ultimately this post is to say that I miss him a lot. The stability, growing up, of Dad working in the garage most days, of me wandering in and out of the garage, helping by holding the reading lamp at a useful angle so he could see, and asking him questions. He did seem to like answering them, so I can only hope (assume is too presumptious) that they were intelligent questions - I do think I learnt a few things but not enough to be predestined to be a mechanic LOL.
I feel sad, knowing that I had and still have no clue just how much he knew, feel sad knowing that if he were still around, he'd enjoy so many things still. I'm sure he'd be blown away by how incredible computers are now; seeing how he enjoyed circuit diagrams so much, it seems an obvious progression that he'd learn about how computers work.
Ok this post is getting off-track, but still. The child in me fierily wishes I could learn everything electrical/mechanical/engine-related, so that I could know what I see when I look in the engine. The grown-up in me understands and just feels sad.
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