Fold COMPLETE YOUR COLLECTION A lockdown special from the publishers of The Road Rat Price: Free Issue No.1 April 2020 Stitch or staple The first four editions of MGM Keir Dullea in 2001: A the world’s Space Odyssey (1968) most beautiful ry to remember that scene everything in your periphery. in 2001: A Space Odyssey You feel the air escaping car quarterly On Lewis/ when Commander Dave around your mouth, over your Bowman re-enters his cheeks and nose, misting up spaceship, Discovery your vision. The sky-blue are available Humanity/ One, and makes his way to plastic gown is loose over your Stitch or staple T HAL’s ‘brain’. What you grey-blue theatre scrubs. The exclusively via might not remember is that gown’s sleeves terminate in two Medicine Kubrick shoots much of this thumbholes, so that it doesn’t our webshop From the front line of the from Bowman’s point of view – slip down over your forearms. you’re inside Bowman’s helmet, You’ve taken off your wedding NHS in the UK, the writer looking through his visor. ring and you’re double-gloved. theroadrat.com of ‘Senna’ sends this What you will remember is his You’re wearing blue plastic powerful despatch loud and steady breathing. overshoes. That’s what it sounds like It’s hot inside and all you can Single issues are currently available at the subscriber price of just £10,00 plus postage and behind a plastic visor as you hear is your breathing. shipping, A choice of fabric slip cases and art prints of the Issue 3 ‘Mystic Mac’ cover are Words: Dr Manish Pandey breathe through an FFP3 mask. The bay in front of you has 12 also available. The Road Rat ships in a sturdy cardboard box directly from our UK HQ. ‘Oz GP’ photography: Darren Heath The curve of the Perspex bends beds, only four of which 2 11 Hamilton on the Thursday: “Really, very surprised…” are occupied, right now. They the antibiotics, the iv lines and worry. You try to articulate are all Covid-positive patients. take blood from those whose their love from behind a dense There are two more in side- veins haven’t collapsed (the paper mask and Perspex visor GROUP LOTUS PLC rooms and one ‘possible’ – phlebotomists are too scared and double gloves, all to the The S4 ‘Sprint’, 126bhp, their swabs being analysed at to come in here) and then background hiss of piped 60mph in 6.6 secs Charing Cross. exchange a few words with oxygen – and your breathing. Andretti attempted to race that my first Elan, a 1970 S4, years later when it was time to The youngest is 62, the oldest them. You’re a stranger now You disrobe, methodically, day DNF’d quickly, while the accessioned soon after moving become graduated and I was 90. Last week, they were all because, of course, they can’t first overshoes, then gown and other Lotus fellas running (in to Boston to attend law school. reminded by the university well – but, now, they are all properly see the eyes and faces gloves in one big ball, dropped last year’s 79) didn’t finish in the A white roadster with knock off that I’d never actually paid that sick. Two of them, terminally. of the blue astronauts tending into the ‘Infectious Waste’ bin. paint. But I bought an adhesive wheels, it was too cool. I loved first semester’s tuition. Oh There is a scoring system them, nor read our lips, nor Then you wash your hands. Lotus-Martini sticker anyway driving it, locally. But it turned those days before widespread to decide the appropriate hear us properly. There is no You emerge, through heavy and proudly stuck it on the seat out the front uprights of its computers, they’d forgotten level of care, based on age, skin-to-skin contact. And you wooden double doors, and take tube of my new bike (a Dawes backbone chassis were rusty, me for quite a while. So I’d ‘performance status’ (what each don’t want to linger any longer off your visor and your mask, Super Galaxy, cycling fans) so until I could effectuate a gotten away with driving an patient could do, before they than you have to because, then wash your hands again. where it’s held up remarkably repair, I tended to float around Elan almost daily for three become ill) and pre-existing honestly, despite all this PPE Your hair is stuck to your head, well. Certainly better than any the highway as the suspension years, putting 20,000 miles on medical conditions. Your soul you are afraid. your scrubs to your body. Lotus I’ve known. subtly shifted a few feet in front it almost free of charge if you is telling you that you should Two patients have mobile You look back through fire- Fast forward 16 years. It is the ahead of me. discount the large amounts of throw the kitchen sink at all of phones – the others don’t. glass at the four patients, each 1980s and after a steady diet A rather larger problem was cash required for repairs. So I them but your crash training, There are no visiting hours. lying alone, their beds spaced of roasted MGAs and MGBs, a that I used my first semester’s had to sell it. But for me it had about this 120-day-old disease, So, you try to deliver a message two metres apart, with one procession of Volvo Amazons, law school tuition to buy been the scam of a lifetime. dictates otherwise. of love or hope from family senior nurse still inside and and a long interlude driving the Lotus and forgot, which No doubt, Colin So, you adjust oxygen, recheck who are beside themselves with you feel sick to your stomach at ‘70s Opel 1900s, I acquire would come to haunt me three Chapman would’ve approved. #RatTales 8 5 #RatTales — the stories behind the stories. Issue 4: The Road Rat Book Club the police, who then seized it. He had to cough up a further £2k to buy it back, “Today they would call it cognitive dissonance and there is probably medication available to deal with such absurd but had to wait until he was done for speeding in it in a 30mph zone a short eclecticism. But at the time, this time being when I was about sixteen, I did not think it odd to be simultaneously while later for a mention in our local newspaper. He was the local vicar.” interested in the Metaphysical Poets and in designing racing-cars. I had as well, subsidiary interests in girls and Robin Swithinbank @Swithinbanking beer. I can’t now recall the edition of John Donne that I favoured, but I will never forget the other literature. There Share your family car stories with the hashtag #MyFathersCar McQueen’s barking vanity THANKS project, so overwrought with cod philosophy that it forgets to be a film at all. ‘When you’re racing, WE’LL CALL it’s life. Anything that happens before or after is just waiting.’ YOU. You don’t need to hear this from the hollow of your sofa. Here’s to the crazy ones. How can a subject so redolent Ideas after their time with danger produce such By Paul Horrell ennui? And the descent has barely begun. Jerry Imagine being the Mercedes Bruckheimer’s NASCAR porno technique had been paid, engineer who invented the Days of Thunder twangs the gag Music for and something else was jump wiper on the W124. A reflex, narrative arc flattened visible through the ennui. work of genius, a single wiper by an overwhelming desire to Guitarist William Reid was in whose arm magically extended see its protagonist die horribly. the open a relationship with Mazzy Star so as to reach into the far upper Similar sentiment meets Driven, singer Hope Sandoval at the corners of the screen, then starring and written by Sylvester time, and it’s her haunting, shortened so it didn’t overlap Stallone. Next-level nadir, a “I’m getting notes of Road Speed, beauty and gauzy vocal – duetting with the A-posts when it reached the film so poor it unites fans of extreme elegance..” The Jesus and Mary Chain the other Reid brother, horizontal. At every up-and- motorsport and those utterly feat. Hope Sandoval – Jim – that gives ‘Sometimes back cycle. It was mesmerising. indifferent to it in steadfast rule that says any wine with Always’ its character. This And never heard of again. Waste contempt. a picture of a car on the label ‘Sometimes Always’ isn’t the American open road of an engineer’s career. To Rush then, Ron Howard’s quick should be best placed at the By Jason Barlow @jasonbarlowuk as depicted by The Eagles, Guess it was a cost thing (the biopic of the Hunt/Lauda back of the cupboard. The Jackson Browne or Tom Petty; W124 sat at the apex of the rivalry. Here’s a film that drinks kitchen cupboard. Not so Peter The Mary Chain were always no, this one shimmers with the Benz cost-no-object era). Or threatens to salvage some Mullin’s ‘Mullin Estate’ wines, enamoured of America’s slightly broken quality that you were later simpler double-pivot dignity for the genre. Proper Peter Mullin’s wines are each inspired by one of the promise, mythical or otherwise. encounter in those one-horse wipers simply OK? character development, elegant and tasteful, of course pre-war French beauties from It’s there in 1985’s debut album towns that frame the Mojave Like Procon Ten.