So there I was, lugging my fat about the hills in a bid to be rid of it, an ageing man on the move, striding out, not swinging the arms with the vigour of the truly committed, but still filling the chest, and shifting, as my mother used to say, the cobwebs, and I came down the muddy little steps onto the end of Foster Terrace and there in front of me, not 30 yards away, in all its unglory, was youth, decadent youth.
I wrote last week about a crusty landlord many years ago who hurled us from his pub for being long-haired and decadent. Well the feelings that surged in him back then were the same as surged in me when I beheld this youth, with the only difference being that the landlord was wrong to feel this way and I was right. My reason was the car, the youth's car.
You have already pictured it. Low-slung, fat-tyred, over-powered, dark-windowed. With all its vile appurtenances it had to be worth at least $20,000. Aged 18 I did not have $20,000. How did this youth get it? Theft? Criminally indulgent parents? Loan sharks? I don't know and in reality I don't much care. And nor do I resent his having a car. Or his driving it too fast, so long as he doesn't drive it into me. What I resent is the noise.
The beast is designed to make more noise than it needs to. Its noise is its point. It exists to announce its presence. Its primitive testosteronic growl belongs on an Attenborough documentary. And when it intrudes on my world with a violence that silences conversation, that crushes thought and peace, I become on the instant like my old dog Baz, a horse-sized beast as black as midnight, who, whenever he heard a noise he thought might constitute a threat would leap from the chair he slept in and stand tall and proud facing the source of the noise - be it the roar of wind, or the hiss of a possum and the hackles would rise along his back from nape to rump, like some furry stegosaurus.