Dad’s Cobra kit-car

Funeral’s good but it’s not the one. It’s like one, though. I mean we’ve all been standing outside and feeling sick and something has more-or-less died.

What it is really is that my Dad’s been building a kitcar for over twenty years — and now he’s had to sell it on account of he can’t afford to finish it off and it’s been plonked under sheets for a couple of years.

Twenty years, We’re talking my age; leastways my brother’s age and certainly for longer than my sister’s been breathing. The car, it’s a Cobra replica – an AC Cobra – in British racing green.

It’s quite a lovely thing – a V8 engine strapped into a fibreglass body – and usually I’m not so fussed by cars.

But to understand my dad I guess I’ve had to because a) it’s been his life, and b) this was his longest project; the thing you’d tell friends about at school. ‘My dad’s building a rocket-car’, maybe, or things very much like that. Because it really is. Because if you strap a V8 to a fibreglass body you might as well be throwing a ramjet onto a bicycle. It’s as sleek as it’s silly. Dad used to race rocket cars too, see.

Used to throw Minis into tiny spaces or through tinier gaps and get trophies; used to drive fast cars up slow hills and win trophies for that too.

So why am I bothered? Sure I know it’s only a car. But probably it’s slightly because I have so many memories of it growing up — of playing hide and seek, lying under it, and getting fibreglass dust in my knees — and then it’s mainly because Dad’s eyes might’ve grown a little wet when the trailer pulled into the road.

Now he’s just pretending like it was just putting some bottles in the bottlebank, or taking some vinyl to a carboot. I think he keeps sighing and being philosophical about it, which makes it worse. My guts tighten a bit when I think about how much he’s put into it and for how long he’s talked about doing track-days and hill races in it.

Or maybe they tighten because most of my memories – and we’re talking even right back before my parents seperated — paint him as being his happiest when showing me the bits and bobs of this car.