User talk:Ratdat

Your Colt

Is that serendipity? Not sure it is. But it must be one of those chances of 1 to 1000 against. Then again, if each week we encounter a thousand 1 in 1000 chances that end up on the side of the 999, then the really unbelievable bit would be if the 1 in 1000 NEVER came round. In the early 1980s I worked in the travel trade and a large chunk of the remuneration involved the chance to travel on (otherwise) empty seats: I had the habit, when travelling, of photographing cars. And when I came home to Cambridge, I used to cycle round at weekends, sometimes, doing much the same. It was regarded as pretty darned geeky by friends and, much of the time, me. But it's handy, now, for Wikipedia where there seems to be an abundance of car photos covering the cars from the last 15 or so years, but relatively few from the 1970s and 1980s (and, alas, even fewer from the preceding decades). As another coincidence, in 1985 my father died and I inherited his Mitsubishi Colt Galant 1.6 GL (UK nomenclature: Mitsubishi loved to confuse us by calling their cars by any one of half a dozen different names according to where you lived): thereafter I, too, for several years had my car serviced at the dealer in Waterbeach named in your webpage entry. I found them helpful and competent. But back in the earlier 1980s I didn't have a car: travel money went on British Rail season tickets for London commuting which (then as now) were horribly expensive for what they offered in terms of rail travel costs in the rest of Europe. I don't know how well you know Cambridge, but 'your' car I photographed opposite E{?m)manuel College, roughly (then as now) outside the Robert Sayle main entrance. So maybe the bus in the background has just emerged from Drummer Street, unless it has come along from whatever the road was called that back then went past Woolworth's. I photographed the Colt because it was a new model in a clean condition. The silly angle was probably a device to avoid including something irrelevant in the shot: back then it wasn't so easy to crop and clean up pictures after they came back from the developpers' lab. Hmmm small world and that. And thanks for taking time to inform me of this instance... Regards Charles01 (talk) 16:37, 27 January 2008 (UTC)