Empty Roads, But Nowhere To Go

I really chose the wrong time to go self-employed, it seems. When I gave up the stability of a full time job back in November, I had no clue that I'd be sitting here five months later with no realistic income, and no idea when said income would come back.

However, sitting between the proverbial rock and hard place of both not having any income from contracted work, and not being able to claim anything off the government at this time, I realised that there's something far, far worse to keep me occupied during the lockdown we currently find ourselves in. The fact that, for the first time in most-likely decades, the roads are empty. There's an unbelievable lack of traffic, tailbacks, or terrible drivers ruining every fun B-road in the East of England. But sadly, something else is also missing on the roads of the region.

Me.

It's horrid. The sun is out in force with little in the way of cloud. The air is warm, yet a gentle breeze keeps things pleasantly mild. The roads are, as mentioned, empty. And yet despite the fact that my portion of the driveway is currently occupied by two fantastic driving machines in the shape of a Eunos Roadster and an RX-8, I can't use them. I have to wake up every morning and look at them, knowing that the one thing I want to do more than anything in the world, is an impossibility. It's selfish, I know, as around the country hundreds of thousands of people are still working during this phase to keep the country in a somewhat functional state, while I complain about not being able to have the luxury of a Sunday drive - but still, it's bloody annoying.

As such, I've had to find other ways of keeping busy - but this, it turns out, is somewhat easy when you've got a penchant for old-ish Japanese cars. You see, as mentioned, I've got a Eunos Roadster - quite a special one in fact, as it's the same Eunos Roadster that I sold to my good friend Andrew a few months ago. Just before lockdown, Andrew had made the frankly absurd decision that he preferred the idea of driving around in my Jaguar XJ6, with its supreme comfort, effortless class and exquisite refinement, to driving around in the Eunos Roadster, with its squeaking, rattling, ticking and clicking. I mean, who even thinks like that? As such, a deal was struck to swap them over, meaning that I ended up with 'Kurt' as he's affectionately known, back.

Now the best thing about Kurt is that he's from back in the dark days of 1992, making him 28 years old. I'm going to drop the 'he' pronoun as frankly it feels weird, but as with any 28 year old car, there are quite a lot of things that degrade over time. So, with a sudden abundence of spare time, quite a lot of those things can be fixed. And sure enough, for nearly a week, I was able to keep myself amused with odd-jobs like making sure the throttle and handbrake cables had the correct tension, making sure the paint was machine polished back and waxed, making sure that the roof latches are as good as they can be - but now, I've run out of things to do.

Luckily though, the RX-8 is back, and courtesy of a family friend who has similarly been finding car-related things to do to fill the time-void a lot of us now seem to have, it even has a new engine in it - excellent stuff. As such, the next few days will consist of doing the same stuff to this one, to get it as good as it can possibly be. And once that's done? Well, I'll have two very well-sorted cars that I can...look at, and nothing more.

Might be time to find another hobby.