BMW M1 – Driven To Write

Andrew Miles takes the M1 to model nirvana.

Scrubs up well for a forty year old. She’s kept her figure, had her wild years, now slowly gravitating toward middle age with maturity and style.

As a child I was mesmerised by the BASF colour scheme on the BMW M1. The car screams out speed, aggression, power; language that only red can truly deliver. The white circles emanate a sense of power, creating reflections akin to water ripples or the blast wave of an explosion, placed on the bodywork at jaunty angles.

Maybe on my tenth birthday the model arrived, not to be raced or hurled into the garden with abandon. No, this Red Devil was for cherishing, made centre stage, set apart from all those lesser model cars; pretty well untouched. My memory does not serve me well, did I Continue reading “Thirty Minutes”

Driven to Write forces down some Texas tea.

A year which appeared to consist of little but tit-for-tat nuclear weapons tests by opposing cold war powers, that uniquely played host to three different Catholic pontiffs, where the Red Brigades kidnapped and murdered former Italian Prime Minister, Aldo Moro, and where Spain finally renounced the last vestiges of dictatorship by declaring a democracy, 1978 experienced its share of geopolitical turmoil.

Distraction was the order of business, with cinema-goers enjoying the top-grossing musical, Grease, while the music charts remained dominated by disco’s glitterball. The Bee Gees’ soundtrack to 1977’s Saturday Night Fever held the number spot in the American billboard chart for a death-gripping 21 weeks, with Night Fever the year’s top-selling single. In the UK, it was German (open inverted commas) recording artists (close inverted commas) Boney M, with Rivers of Babylon, which kidnapped the affections of the mainstream UK record buying public.

But not all. While Elvis Costello and the Attractions’ 1978 release attempted to Continue reading “Anniversary Waltz 1978 – This Year’s Model”