Ten years ago, back when this sort of thing happened frequently, two car manufacturers invited me (and, I should quickly add, many other people) to drive, in the same week, models which were just about to go on sale. This was a splendid development, as it would allow me to create, in a short period, a lot of what those of us who dimly remember using typewriters are slightly hesitant to call ‘content’, and since at that time I was the editor of the UK’s oldest independent online motoring magazine, creating content about cars was the main purpose of my existence.
The first of these events was hosted by Toyota, and would start in Amsterdam on the Wednesday and end on the Thursday. The second was hosted by Jeep, and would start in the Cotswolds on the Thursday and end on the Friday. It would, I thought, be a simple matter to drive away from Amsterdam on Thursday lunchtime and arrive in the Cotswolds before the hotel stopped serving dinner. That trip would also give me extra insight into an Audi I had on loan, which I would otherwise experience only by bumbling along the roads around my then home in the west of Scotland.
This seemed very satisfactory, but at some point I realised it could be made more so if I arranged the loan of another car during the same period, allowing me to produce still more content without adding anything at all to the duration of the journey. It so happened that a new Mercedes had just been introduced but I hadn’t yet driven it. I called Mercedes, whose UK headquarters is in Milton Keynes, and put forward the idea that I might drop in, borrow an example, drive it to Amsterdam and back in a day and a half and then write about it afterwards. Mercedes – as keen as I was that I should produce content relating to one of its cars – responded positively.
In the very last piece of good fortune associated with what became a nightmarish affair, I then learned that a friend called Belinda would be visiting her daughter in Warwick that week, and proposed to take a train to Glasgow on the Friday. Since I would be passing close to Warwick on my return from the Jeep event, and actually driving through Glasgow on the way home, I suggested that she could save herself the train fare and accompany me in the Audi, which I would by now have retrieved from Milton Keynes after returning the Mercedes on the way to the Costwolds. Better still, perhaps she could be of assistance by sharing the driving of the Audi if she was insured to do so, which Audi confirmed she was. Belinda accepted the offer, and I, unaware of what lay ahead, congratulated myself on organising things so efficiently.
I had to work on the Tuesday, which would mean leaving late that night, reaching Milton Keynes at around three in the morning, swapping the Audi for the Mercedes and then driving to the Eurotunnel terminal in Folkestone, where I would catch a train due to leave at twenty past eight. This might sound like a bizarre scheme to you, but it was so similar to other bizarre schemes I had undertaken that I didn’t see a problem with it. I would have no sleep on the Tuesday night, but plenty on each of the following nights, so recovery would be swift.
All of the above had been arranged when I received another invitation. This one was from Citroen, which was launching not one but two new models and would, the PR department kindly informed me, be pleased if I attended. The opportunity to produce more content was appealing, but unfortunately the event would be taking place on the Thursday when I would be saying goodbye to the Toyota people at lunchtime and saying hello to the Jeep people several hours later. Between these events there would be no time to make a diversion to drive Citroens, so obviously it would be absurd to accept.
Equally obviously, however, it would be absurd to decline, because the Citroen event was being held in Amsterdam, the very place I would be when it started. I couldn’t go, because I had to drive to the Cotswolds via Milton Keynes, but at the same time I couldn’t not go, because I would be right on the doorstep. It would be madness to drive eight hundred miles from home to the Toyota event, then four hundred and fifty miles from there to the Jeep event, then four hundred miles back home, but miss out on the Citroen event when it should, assuming everything went well (spoiler alert: everything did not go well), take no more than ten minutes to travel there, especially if it meant I could write five articles rather than the originally planned three, in addition to the one I would have written anyway about the Audi if none of this had happened.
A compromise would have to be reached, and that compromise, I realised, involved me missing a night in bed twice that week rather than just once. I told the Citroen people I would be happy to see them in Amsterdam, then contacted the Jeep people and advised them to expect me on Friday morning rather than Thursday evening.
It was all still making some kind of sense to me long before dawn on the Wednesday when I arrived at Mercedes HQ and explained my business to the chap in a booth at the security gate, who directed me to a particular section of the car park where I should leave the Audi. I did that, then walked back to the security gate, where the chap said he didn’t seem to have the car I was looking for. I said there must be some mistake, since I’d been assured it would be waiting for me. He had a second look through the large collection of keys in his booth, then picked up several sheets of paper and began studying those.
When he reached one particular sheet he stopped, looked at me more closely than he had done at any point in the conversation so far and asked a question I never expected anyone to ask me.
“You’re not Roger Federer, are you?”
Slightly unwillingly, I admitted that Roger Federer and I were not the same person. He grunted, worked his way through the remainder of the sheets and then announced that however strongly I believed there was a car on the premises with my name on it, there plainly wasn’t. I was, however, welcome to look in another section of the car park which seemed to me very much like every other section but apparently had some significance I wasn’t aware of. If ‘my’ Mercedes was in the vicinity, that was where it would be. I wandered off, searched the area and discovered that although Mercedes vehicles abounded there, none of them was meant for me.
It was now twenty past three – far too early in the morning to contact any of the people who needed to know about this. With the agreement of the security chap, I grabbed some fitful sleep in the Audi where it sat rather than driving off to find another part of Milton Keynes where this could be done, then began sending texts to representatives of Mercedes and Toyota shortly before seven. The Toyota PR boss, on being told that I would arrive in mid-afternoon rather than at lunchtime, replied that he would make sure a car was left for me at the starting point of the event (a restaurant on the outskirts of Amsterdam), and from there I could make my way to Rotterdam, where everyone else would be by that time.
A Mercedes press officer called me, apologised in a high-pitched voice and said he would be in Milton Keynes as soon as possible. I told him about the Audi and where it was, and in due course he walked towards it, carrying the keys to the car I should have driven away several hours earlier, which he had brought from some location I didn’t ask about. He said it had a full tank of fuel but hadn’t been cleaned – would I like that to be done? I reckoned there wasn’t much point, thanked him for his efforts, took the keys and headed for Folkestone, which I would have to reach in twenty minutes if I was to catch the train I’d been booked on.
Obviously that didn’t happen, but I got there at about eleven, hoping to be allowed on the next train heading to Calais. That didn’t happen either, because an earlier crossing had been cancelled and it was taking a long time to work through the backlog of travellers, so I had to hang around for another two hours. In the end it was six in the evening when I arrived at the restaurant just outside Amsterdam, where I foolishly asked the first waiter I saw if he spoke English, not realising that Dutch people in the service industries speak English better than I do. Disguising, though with visible effort, his contempt at this ridiculous question, he said he did, and he’d been informed of the situation, and here were the keys to the Toyota, sir, and yes of course I could leave the Mercedes in the car park overnight, and he hoped I had a pleasant drive to Rotterdam.
I did, partly because the navigation instructions, though apparently translated from another language into English by someone who needed more practice, were simple enough. After dinner, I went to bed, expecting to sleep soundly, but in fact didn’t and woke up stupidly early. A strange thing about human physiology, or mine anyway, is that if you have a long period without sleep your body seems to decide that this is the way things are now, and you’re going to stay awake for the rest of your life. That was happening to me now, so rather than just lie there unproductively I got up and wrote and uploaded an article about the adventure so far, calling it ‘Five am in Amsterdam’ after the song by Michelle Shocked, though I had to explain that it should really have been called ‘Six am in Rotterdam’. A reader commented that I had appeared to have taken leave of my senses, which was probably true.
The journey back to Amsterdam was less pleasant because, rather than pay attention to the navigation instructions on the more complex return route, I instead took what I thought would be the easier option of following another Toyota driven by two colleagues, who got spectacularly lost. We made it back to the restaurant eventually, whereupon I climbed back into the Mercedes and headed on the short run to the hotel at Schiphol airport which, because of a breakdown in communications about the parking arrangements, took an hour and a half instead of the predicted ten minutes, during which I was at one point shouted at by a Dutch policeman.
I drove one of the Citroens around Amsterdam and the other a little further afield to a village called Marken (nice place, you’d like it), then returned to Schiphol, fired up the Mercedes again, went back through the Eurotunnel, drove to Milton Keynes, dropped off the Mercedes, picked up the Audi, drove part of the way to the Cotswolds, stopped in a layby for half an hour’s sleep and in due course arrived at the Jeep venue when everyone else – damn their eyes – was still in bed.
Although by now I probably wasn’t in a fit state to drive anything, I was nevertheless permitted to drive Jeeps that morning, then got back in the Audi, began heading north, collected Belinda (who graciously pretended not to notice the musty odour of a car I had slept in twice in the last two days), shared the driving back to Glasgow as arranged, dropped her off and then drove home solo, arriving at the now all too familiar time of three in the morning and, as I collapsed into a bed I felt I hadn’t seen for several months, wondered, as I had wondered before and have wondered since, how my life had turned out this way.
Top image of Marken, Netherlands, copyright Massimo Catarinella.
https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0/legalcode.en
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