What does this have to do with me?
Not much except that 1: As super heroes go he's easily my favorite and 2: Much of what we think often turns out to be wrong.
Take me for instance. No kids (that was ever proved), no wife (dodged that bullet or what?) never owned a house and a string of jobs that were, at the very least, forgettable. As a kid I thought I might be a radio engineer like my Dad, but that is fairly standard for kids. Then I thought I'd join the Air Force (while we still had one worth the mention, gee thanks Uncle Helen!) as an armorer (glasses and hopeless maths meant no flying for Micky) until I remembered I loath getting up early and don't cope well with being shouted at by someone I cant shout back at. Anon......
So, here I am 30 years later with few actual qualifications but a fair bit of what is politely termed 'life experience'.
I wont bore you with the details, but (and I would never have guessed THIS!) here I am as live in help to my aged parents. Pretty sweet gig really, I do all the driving, fetch and carry, wood chopping, edges of the lawns with the hand mower. The middle bits Pop does on his ride-on mower, something he loves to do. That sort of thing. For this the government pays me (literally) a couple of bucks more than the dole. Gee thanks, don't strain yourselves or nothing.
I could have lived in the house with my folks, even had a choice of bedrooms but instead I took the 3rd option. I moved into the camper.
The Camper. It's a 1980 Ford Transit with a camper body commercially built by......I don't know. Yet. Originally it was organized (not a word I would have used) as a 6 (!) birth but as will become evident this soon changed. The original motor was the 'Gee this looks like a good idea' V4 2 liter petrol engine that, in all fairness, when fresh was a fairly good mill. At some point in the camper's somewhat chequered history this P.O.S has died (or was killed) and was replaced with the evergreen 2 liter Ford Cortina mill. I dont like Fords. I was completely and utterly put off them when I made the huge mistake as a teenager of sinking all my hard earned scratch into a Mk4 Zephyr, complete with the utterly worthless V6 3 liter motor that nearly inspired me to either murder or suicide on a daily basis until in a rush of sense I finally towed it to the dump and left it. Good job. As I watched the heap receding in the rear view mirror I swore a mighty and terrible oath to all Gods past, present and future to never own a Ford again. 25 Years later, enter the camper. See what I mean about stuff turning out to be wrong?
In all fairness the Cortina motor is actually a Ford success story, millions have been made and used for everything from water pump motors to potent racing engines. Guess I'll just learn to live with it. If nothing else it's a simple and easily worked on design, and in the Transit engine bay it looks like a beer crate in an otherwise empty basement. The other up side is the camper has no power steering, no A/C, a 4 speed gear box that only needs to keep full of oil to probably never fail and, as I discovered, no heater either (more on this later). In short it starts good, runs ok and isn't weighed with useless and power sapping junk. So far so good. Right about now you are probably saying 'yes but wouldn't a diesel motor be better?' Yes and no. Yes, it would be faster on hills and in head winds and a tank of diesel will go nearly twice as far and is about 50 cents a liter cheaper than gas.
The no part. Here in sunny scenic New Zealand we dont pay tax at the pump on diesel fuel. To make sure the diesel driver is gouged as much as petrol users, we pay a road tax in the form of road mileage. You buy this in 1000 km blocks and get a sticker to put next to your registration sticker behind the windscreen. This gets checked by sundry government flunkies and there are stiff fines if you get caught out. Also it relates to the vehicle not the owner, so it's possible to buy a diesel car/truck, whatever that owes a pile of mileage and the new owner gets landed with it. Nice. Add to this the 'ohmighod!' cost of fixing a diesel and, unless you plan on doing a pile of mileage, like an epic holiday or something, I don't think it's worth it. By my counting it would cost about $2500-3000 to do a proper job of installing a decent diesel donk. That buys a pile of gas. I may back track on this once I have a few trips behind me and can get a better idea of $/km's.
Back to the camper..
God knows I don't begrudge my parents my being here and helping out, but the simple fact is the stuff I do for them is only a tiny fraction of my day, the rest of the time is mine. Once I caught up on my sleep it quickly became apparent I was slowing going out of my god-damn skull with with boredom. Pot helped, but even this palled, not to mention the cost. It was at this point that my folks generously gifted the camper to me.
Now I have a project! OK, it's not emperor of Iceland or, quite, a Polynesian long ship, but it will do in the mean time and will later be instrumental in my larger plan. Right about now the more astute of you will be saying 'Yeah cool, but why does the front of the camper read 'Goldies' and where does Martin-Baker fit in?
It's the custom here (and maybe the rest of the camper world too, I don't know) to name your camper in the same fashion as naming a water craft. Goldie's comes from a previous owner, a chap named Goldstein. I never liked the name and ratted my brain for something I could relate to. Fuck You! sprung to mind but this may have cause problems later for all that it is largely sincere. So much brain searching, name trying etc until I remembered an episode of 'JAG' where a pilot was forced to land his jet in the middle of a desert intact, then tried to walk to safety only to be picked up by bad guys. In the show off tape his captors made of him, he acted mentally deranged and would intersperse his anti-american script with 'no martin-baker, no martin-baker' as a clue that his jet was intact and could be retrieved. Martin-Baker being the manufacturer of ejector seats..........
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