The day after I sold my stamps I spoke to Melanie Kilim again about her unusual fear of the Post Office Tower. Then I walked to the postbox at the end of my road and sent her a Maryland Forgery of the Tower stamp with the missing olive-green. I hoped that, for the first time in her life, she would enjoy the stamp without reservations. In fact, the opposite occurred. She wanted to know the answer to a question that, more calmly expressed, might have been a Zen riddle: if the tower wasn't on the stamp, 'Then where the hell was it?' She said that the stamp gave her palpitations.
I was tempted to reply, 'I know exactly what you mean.'
* * *
Postscript
I thought my relationship with David Brandon would end with stamps. But then it spilled over into cars.
I had once spent a very arduous lunchtime talking to a computer engineer about his modern QE2 errors, and after an hour of nothing he said one very interesting thing. He had bought many of his stamps from Brandon, and described him as 'almost a father figure'. I knew what he meant by this. Brandon was paternal in a number of ways, and ideally so. He was friendly, generous, fine at his job, older, he cared for his sons, he was knowledgeable and full of guidance.
Apart from stamps, Brandon spent his money on cars. The only other man I had met who had a private car collection—i.e. cars that would never be seen picking up from schools or buying food—was Nick Freeman, the lawyer known as Mr Loophole for his skill in getting David Beckham and Alex Ferguson out of the clutches of the traffic police. Freeman opened up his Knutsford garage and showed me his Bentley and his BMW. Brandon opened up his garage one day to show me his Jaguar, his Porsche Turbo, Linda's soft-top Mercedes. The Jaguar, which had thirty thousand miles on it ('barely run in!') had every conceivable gadget and luxury, and the most beautiful stitching on the leather. The cars' number plates were DB-something, just as Freeman's were NF-something.
A few weeks after I had sold him my stamps, I returned to Guildford to see Brandon about another Jaguar he wanted to show me. I sat in his office as he found the keys, and his girlfriend Linda came in wearing a very short skirt.
'Would you like a sandwich?' she asked.
'I would.'
'A salmon sandwich?'
'A salmon sandwich would be good, and some tea even better.'
'Not too much salmon please, Linda,' David said. 'Don't overload it.'
He said that the Jaguar he was about to show me was simply staggering. Brandon had previously sent me a couple of emails about the car. He had bought it from a nearby dealer, a friend of his, and he thought it represented an absolute bargain. It cost £4,000, which, considering I had almost bought a stamp from him at that price, seemed to be quite good value. Brandon confirmed this by saying 'it's an awful lot of car'. He had bought the car for his son Mark, but Mark had decided he didn't need it, living in Portugal and all that with a Range Rover and a Porsche Cayenne. David had bought it for Mark to run around Guildford in when he came to visit, but it was always easier just to hire a car at the airport for a few days. So it was now on the market, and I was in the garage first in line. Brandon emailed that I would be the car's third owner. New it would have cost about £50,000 fully spec'd. I replied that I was certainly happy to take it for a test drive around his private roads. In one email Brandon said that he hoped it wouldn't be raining when I came down, as that would be such a shame on the polish.
***
In his office I told him that I found it impossible to see myself in his big car. 'How old is Mark?' I asked.
'Thirty-seven, I think.'
'I'm forty-six, but I still feel too young for a Jag. Is that a terrible thing to say?'
'It's a ridiculous thing to say. I had a Jaguar when I was twenty-one. No, I think I was younger. It was an E-Type, I hasten to add.'
We talked about types, about the E-Type, the S-Types and the X-Types.
'The S-Types are a little bit ugly,' Brandon said, 'but the X-Types are quite pretty, I think. In fact, I saw one the other day that was an absolute cracker. I actually went to look at it. It was 200 2, three-litre, four-wheel drive with everything on—everything apart from sat-nav, which you can plug in so it's not a problem—blue with cream hide or parchment I think they call it, twenty-five thousand miles, so nicely run-in. Twelve grand! Unbelievable!'
Brandon walked me to the garage. This wasn't his main garage with his posh cars, but another one a few hundred feet away. As he unlocked the door, he explained that he was about to show me a very special thing, a vehicle that was almost in exactly the same condition as it was when it rolled off the production line twelve years earlier. The Jag was a deep red—not the racing green I would have preferred—and it had done seventy-five thousand miles ('nicely run in'). Brandon revealed the car by removing a large white sheet that was keeping it from unwanted dust and damp. It was a gesture not unfamiliar to fans of the Norwich-based quiz show Sale of the Century, the big reveal of the big prize at the end of every episode. Brandon's car was indeed immaculate and carefully polished, and had every conceivable luxury apart from sat-nav. The display panel lit up like Kyoto at night, and anything you needed to know was there in dancing LED—which, when the model first appeared in the mid-1980s, represented the very epitome of bachelor style. It was a Sovereign XJ140, and it reminded me of the sort of cars my parents' male friends would drive to their boardrooms. Once, at the age of about eleven, I got a lift back from a Tottenham v. Chelsea match from a man called Henry in a Jaguar or a Daimler, and I felt a little bit lost in the back of it, sliding around on the leather. At that moment I knew two things: that the car Henry was driving was very expensive, and that I would never own one. It wasn't the sort of car I wanted or liked. It was too flat, too plush, too effortless, too boring. It was obviously an old man's car. And now here I was, being schmoozed into one, and thinking positively about it.
I was tempted, but I had qualms. The car was over-immaculate. It wouldn't play well in the London streets overnight. Some knobhead would key it, or the city rain would make it look dirty every other day. Or it would get dented, which I wouldn't actually mind myself, but I feared people would take pity on me. Also, it seemed like a big car to manoeuvre and park, and it was obviously a guzzler, perhaps 18 m.p.g.
Another problem was that I had only recently bought another old car, an iridium blue Saab 900 H reg from 1990, the same model and colour Saab I had bought when my second son was born and which had served us well until my wife was at the wheel in 1999 and a milk float reversed into it and the insurers wrote it off. This had done ninety-two thousand miles and would cost a lot in repairs, but it was a classic, and I couldn't resist it, not because it reminded me of my younger self, but because it was a very cool object with a low chassis and long nose and was a pleasure to drive after a decade of automatic things from Japan. I would have to sell the Saab if I bought the Jag, and would probably make a loss on it, just like I had feared I would do on my stamps.
But the final problem with the Jag was the fact that it was an old man's car. I said to Brandon, 'I'm not sure anyone under sixty who isn't on the board of directors at some small manufacturing company with their own reserved parking space could comfortably drive one of these things.'
Brandon said: 'Nonsense!'
A few weeks later I came down to look at the Jaguar for a second time. I had studied the magazines, including Practical Classics, which had lots of tips on restoring wheel trims and checking for oil leaks. I had also told my new lover about it, and she said I should keep the Saab because the Jag was an old man's car.
There was indeed something great about those classic Saabs, the 99s and the 900s, before General Motors took over and ruined them. Now it was impossible to buy a new Saab with a hatch:* one of the key things that defined it and made first-time drivers into loyal fans. My first experience of a Saab was having a lift away from the Independent on Sunday one day with Sebastian Faulks, when he was still the literary editor and before he hit the jackpot with Birdsong. Faulks had a turbo model,
which suffered famously from turbo lag. He showed me what this meant as we sped up City Road one evening. He put his foot down and drew breath. Nothing. Then someone appeared to strap a rocket to the exhaust and off we hurtled. Faulks grinned, and I had the feeling I wasn't the first to be entertained in this way. Saabs have always had literary connections in London. Ian McEwan drove an old one, and Julian Barnes had been loyal to the brand for years. Even the people who sold them were full of stories. A dealer in Finchley called Neil Franklin, whose dad played the vibes, once told me about The Who at the Isle of Wight festival. The band was on after Hendrix, and Pete Townshend was in his wasted phase. Hendrix blew his mind, the force of his performance so overwhelming that when The Who took the stage Townshend couldn't even tune his guitar properly. He threw his Gibson across the stage, and that guitar eventually found its way to the home of my Saab dealer. Apparently.
I bought my first Saab within a couple of weeks of that ride with Faulks, a standard model not a turbo. It was a great car, but after a while I just took it for granted. I didn't join any owners' clubs or attend rallies, and I didn't have many Saab conversations. But one day not long after I had begun writing about the fall and rise of British wrestling I went down to Kent to see Jackie Pallo. Max Crabtree, brother of Big Daddy Shirley Crabtree, had told me that Jackie Pallo used to be one of the all-time greats, and as proof of this he alerted me to the fact that 'he changed his Saab every year'. I had heard about these sorts of people, although I only tended to mix with those who hung on to their cars until they exploded. Jackie Pallo and his son Jackie Pallo Jnr were initially a bit suspicious of me, the way all old wrestlers are when they meet a journalist. These days everyone knows wrestling was a real sport, but back then there was a widespread belief that it was all fixed. The wrestlers liked to wait until reporters had asked them whether it was all choreographed, and then apply a headlock so painful that the journalist thought they were going to die.
I arrived at Pallo's house on a sweltering summer's day, and he picked me up at Ramsgate station in his Saab, and I told him that I drove the same model. 'Simon,' he said in a measured tone, 'I have lots of Saabs.' This turned out to be true. Pallo collected Saabs. There were eight or nine of them parked on the overgrown verge by his house, each with a different level of rust. He used to drive hundreds of thousands of miles to his fights in these cars, and now he couldn't bear to part with them. When Jackie Jr came out of the house to join us in the garden, his father immediately put his mind at rest as to my trustworthiness. 'It's all right,' he explained as he put his arm around my shoulder. 'He's a Saab man.'
A decade later, I wondered what becoming a Jag man might entail. What would it say about me, other than that I was still clearly susceptible to Brandon's sales patter and had an eye for a bargain? But what if it wasn't a bargain? What if it was another error? I knew very little about cars, and, like most Jewish men, I began to feel uneasy when the bonnet was unlatched. I could barely manage an oil change. There were certain things I knew to look out for. A strange engine noise. Rust. Bubbling chrome. But beyond that there were unprecedented possibilities of mechanical badness. I was thinking of calling in one of those RAC guys who give the car the once-over and then give you the nod or the shake, but I felt nervous of doing this in Brandon's presence. It seemed like an insult, as if I didn't trust him to buy a nice car for his son.
'Pete,' Brandon said to his other son, 'you can bring the car round anytime now.' Brandon told me that the car was now out of MOT and tax, and came without any sort of warranty. 'If the door drops off tomorrow there isn't a lot you can do about it apart from buy a new door.' As we waited for the car to appear, Brandon told me that he'd been buying so much material that he really didn't know when he was going to catalogue it all—he reckoned he was about eighteen months behind. He just had too much expertising to do—he thought he dispensed about three thousand certificates a year. He also said he'd just come back from a weekend in Monaco with Linda, at which he'd spent almost 800,000 euros at one auction. *
The car arrived out front. 'Look at this chrome,' Brandon purred. 'They just don't do this any more. We climbed inside and I found the button that glided back the seat. 'The back seat is virtually unused in twelve years,' Brandon said. 'The front seats are heated ... two owners...' He pulled out the cigarette lighter and looked at it. 'Not even a smoker!' Brandon told me he had recently driven the car down to Andover, and it purred all the way. Not driving it was a sin, he reasoned, a real crime locking it up in a garage all the time. I was beginning to feel sorry for a shank of metal. We prowled around his estate and into the driveway of the Vice-Chancellor of Surrey University who lived near by. It was a stately parade, and I drove slowly enough to examine the cruise control and hi-fi, and I started to feel like my dad.
My father never had a Jag, but I imagined that if he didn't aspire to a Sovereign he probably longed for an E-Type. He certainly could have afforded one, but perhaps he felt it was a car without irony, a car that didn't say anything about its driver other than 'I've bought a Jag!'. But now a man in his mid-forties driving a red 1994 model meant something else, something more complex. If it didn't mean I had style, perhaps it meant I was an individualist. I had something most other people at my age didn't, which is a state of affairs I'd always longed for. And I was taking a risk—about how I'd be perceived, about whether I owned something that would last. I wondered what my dad would have thought about me driving around those private roads. Would he have felt pride? Would he have acknowledged a yearning that would never be fulfilled? Would he have liked the colour?
And when I thought about my father I also wondered what he would have made of my adventures with stamps. Perhaps in time he would have appreciated my lifelong interest, and seen them as more than postage. He would have seen their value rise, and observed what could be learnt about the world from philately. I considered whether he would have got on with Brandon, and I imagined he would; they both liked order and efficiency, and they delighted in a sense of propriety.
I also thought about how my life had become entwined with postal life. My brother had worked at the Royal Free Hospital, and both my children were born there—its outer wall bears a Blue Plaque proclaiming that Rowland Hill lived here in his latter years until his death in 1879; for half of my life I walked through Rowland Hill Street on my way to Belsize Park Tube station. More recently, I have lived in a house in St Ives, Cornwall, called the Old Post Office Garage, a converted building that once sheltered Royal Mail delivery vans and still has a GPO wicker basket under the stairs where we keep beach gear.
And there was another Rowland Hill address that came to mean something unexpected. In January 2007 I received an email from a man called John Fulljames, the Artistic Director of The Opera Group. He was directing a new opera called The Shops for a touring production later in the year, the highlight of which was a few days at the Linbury Theatre, the studio theatre of the Royal Opera House. He had read a piece I had written about my love of stamps, and wondered whether I would write the programme notes for the opera, anything on the theme of collecting, obsession and consumerism, the big themes of The Shops. I said I would, especially if I could attend rehearsals and come to a performance. I wrote the piece, and in early July made my way to the Jerwood Space rehearsal room in Southwark. From Southwark Tube station I passed the Rowland Hill estate, but there was a better surprise when I arrived.
'You know you're in it?' John Fulljames told me.
'In what?'
'Obliquely, you're in the opera. Your name.'
I had read the libretto before I wrote my programme notes, but I must have read it at speed. In the rehearsals they ran through the following passage, sung by a police officer called Oliver to a judge (the policeman is reading out a list of stamps allegedly stolen by the opera's anti-hero).
Oliver: The Belk Medal, eighty, phosphor-treated paper. Distant Galaxies, twenty, tête-bêche pair. Two Hundred and Fiftieth Anniversary of the Death of La Bruyère, commemorative st
amp, retouched. The Garfield Tower, forty, embossed printing, single copy. The Postal Service in Greenland, Then and Now, fifteen, thirty, fifty, steel plate engraving, watermark.
Never mind the Postal Service in Greenland, my name was finally on a stamp, albeit a fictional one. John Fulljames told me it was a direct reference to my love of the Post Office Tower error, and I was overwhelmed with gratitude. In fact, I was still blushing when I left the rehearsal room. The Garfield Tower; forty, embossed printing, single copy. And then I thought, 'Imagine singing that...'
Before I made a decision on the car, Brandon took me for lunch again at the Squires Holt. It was getting on for Christmas, and every table was decked with crackers and booked for parties. But Brandon came here often—in fact, it was the third time we had been in together—and a table was made up especially for him, the way they used to do for Sammy Davis Jr in Las Vegas clubs.
We talked a little about his divorce. I told him that my own divorce proceedings are under way and that it's been an amicable split, a credit to our marriage guidance counsellor. We talk about my children, seventeen and nineteen as I turn forty-eight, and how well they have handled the split, and how much I love them, and how glad I am that we are still very close. And how they still believed stamp collecting to be a hobby of enduring sadness. My affair had broken up after fourteen months and I was now with someone new. I think of this whole period as the most exciting time of my life, as well as the most damaging.
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