> My perpetual
> and subconscious fear is that I will make them 'too nice to drive.'
I suspect that is what has happened to a lot of "classics" as they get
restored. They become too good to be degraded by use unless you have
the time and inclination that Jim has to put into keeping the car in
like new shape. That and people deciding the cars are no longer
comfortable enough to be the daily driver as the owner ages, changes
proportions and looses flexibility.
> Triumphs tend to appeal to people who knew them when they were young.
> This creates a wave of people interested in a particular model of car,
> similar to a baby boomer effect. That wave of people goes through a
> life cycle of wanting the cars, then getting to a point they can finally
> afford one but don't have much left over, then getting to a point in
> life with a bigger bank account and more time to cover nice paint jobs
> and frame-up restorations.
This seems to be a byproduct of aging in a rapidly changing culture. As
one gets older one tends to feel increasingly uncomfortable with rapid
change. Mentally they feel less able to keep up with everything. More
and more things around them are evolving into something alien to their
understanding and increasingly out of their control. They start looking
for areas of stability in the things they can control to balance the
changes they can not control.
Someone people working in tech may embrace the latest changes and trends
in their field of focus but feel increasingly uncomfortable with rapid
changes elsewhere.
Somehow as we mature, we just get tired of trying to keep up with
everything and start looking to the things in our past that meant
security and comfort for stability. A place where we can just take a
deep breath and relax. We also look there to the things that excited us
back then for safe known controlled excitement today. Maybe it is an
evolutionary advantage to have the young blaze new paths with the mature
showing the young which paths are not so new and holding the existing
infrastructure together for the next generation??
I think for most mature people their maximum comfort zone is with the
things that they had positive associations with growing up and in their
early 20's when everything was still new, exciting and they felt in
control. A lot of our individual preferences tend to freeze in our late
teens & early 20's and our deepest comfort refuges are those places we
felt most secure in as young children. Things that we really liked at
those ages tend to be comfortable knowns as we age and start to feel
increasingly out of touch with the latest rage.
look at antique stores. Most focus on household things that were common
in households 30 to 50 years ago and not real antiques. Why? Those
furnishings & objects remind people of positive comfortable associations
in their childhood. Maybe something that reminds them of happy secure
times in their grandparents home. Maybe something they grew up with.
I know this theory works with me. I grew up on the edge of rural with
lots of countryside and a big garden. While my parents were into Fords,
the nearest neighbor drove Jags and MGs. They always seemed somewhat
exotic and exciting. Like they were living life with zest and not just
going though the motions of living. As a child I watched travelogues of
Africa with people driving Land Rovers and each week Mutual of Omaha
brought me Mr. Perkins interacting with the "Wild Kingdom" in his Land
Rover. I moved away from my parents home after getting my first college
degree. It was the late '60s and the move from my parents house was
into a mountain commune on a working winery about 50 miles away from San
Francisco. I worked in tech on weekdays, gardened and went to rock
concerts in SF on weekends.
Today I live in the country much in an early seventies back to nature
lifestyle, drive a Land Rover and a Triumph, sleep on a water bed
(since 1969), drink decent wines, have furniture that are mostly
antiques and collect kerosene lamps. My music is mostly a mix of sixties
folk music, surfing music and late sixties through early seventies rock
with a touch or classical & swing thrown in for variety. Since I work
in tech. I use a fairly decent computer system. But even that is a
mixture. The independent free spirit flavour of the Macintosh, the
creativity of a web designer, a home office with a window view of the
garden and horse pasture, a cup of tea at my side typing by the light of
a kerosene student lamp.
I fear somewhat for our Triumphs as we die off. The vast majority of
younger people who were not touched by the magic of British Sports cars
will ignore them as they seek the comfort of the cars that excited them
in their youth. A lucky few will fall into the hands on people who
were touched by them while growing up. Some of the over restored hanger
queens will find themselves in housed collections but I suspect the
majority will find themselves unloved, parked outside beside a building
with a tarp over it to slowly fade into rust.
But for now there is a signal red TR3A that prowls the windy mountain
roads, ringing out with the gutsy roar of a classic British roadster
driven at speed. One still very much in its prime that yields nothing
to the anonomus rice rockets of today. Someday its gutsy voice will
cease and its fierce spirit will fade, but not today. Today we prowl!
TeriAnn
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