in 1987, I bought my dream car. No, it was not a Ferrari or a Porsche, it has been five years Mark II 2.8-liter fuel injected Ford Granada Ghia. This was my dream car because before I had been driving a Datsun 260Z sports car, although I loved him, had given me nothing but trouble and a bad back. Hence my dream car had become the complete antithesis of the Japanese sports car, the US executive lounge. It was so comfortable from the Datsun that in 1988 my friend Colin and I decided to take a tour of camping around Germany.
Early one evening during our trip, on the outskirts of Cologne, a strong metallic creaking began to come from somewhere near the wheel offside before. I pulled over and went down cursing us to see what was wrong. Fortunately, Colin was a trained mechanic, so after a lengthy inspection, he began to explain the situation to me in what seemed to me like the Greek. About 30 minutes in his technical analysis, I put my hand over her mouth and asked him to tell me just how he was. He said it was really bad, something to do with a small car behind the noisy wheel that broke. Just down the road, I saw a sign for a camp, so I was looking Grenada limping in the big field and we set up our tent before heading to the clubhouse to consider our situation.
After three or four beers and no sensible ideas of one of us, Colin decided to my surprise he could speak German. With completely lost confidence, he approached a young couple looking sympathetic to the bar and said in a loud voice. "Excuzen Sie mir Bitte, mein auto ist kaput" The girl spat beer all over her boyfriend as she broke laughing, and as he wiped the beer slowly to the front of his shirt he snapped, "Sorry zat. It is Chust Zat You Eenglish zoooooo his fanny ven you try spik Cherman. "I'm about to point out the irony of his statement when we suddenly became very good friends. "I tell you Vot," he said before I could say, "I buy you guys a beer and talked about your self kaput 'ya?" A few hours later, we were sitting outside tent Klaus and Brigette playing a very complicated board game and be entertained by their black labrador that they were very proud to say, including five languages. Klaus went on to prove it by telling the dog to beg, s' sit, lie down and roll in Italian, German, Spanish, French and English, and the dog dutifully obeyed every time. We crawled out of our tent at about 3 am, after a little alcohol fueled disagreement, but with a they promise to take us to see one of their friends who could help the car in the morning.
to be honest, I really did not expect them to appear the next morning after our discussion, but as it is out they were not as upset their country losing two world wars and one World Cup in English I thought they were, therefore, about ten o'clock we woke to the sound of Brigette hand-painted Volkswagen Beetle idling noisily outside our tent. We dressed quickly pressed into the back seat and, with Brigette driving, went to see their friend. What we found when we arrived we surprised. It turned out that the friend, Markus, owner of a car scrap yard, and there were at least 20 crushed and discarded Ford Granadas like mine lying among many other brands and models. Apparently Ford Granadas sold in the UK since 1977 had been built in Cologne, where mine just happened to break, and Markus made his living by cannibalizing scrap cars for spare parts. An hour later Colin finished a very good second-hand mounting universal joint in my Granada and we were on our way. Markus had refused to accept the money, and whilst Colin worked, Klaus and Brigette had us farewell and disappeared in the general direction of France never to be seen again. What good people. If you fail, do it in the right place (but do not mention the war).