It's the early 1990's. Picture a man in his early 40's, who's been steeped in the tonic of mecnanised sport ever since he's been able to toddle and has hedonistically pursued every financially available avenue, and one or two others that weren't, is about to give it all up to embark upon life's greatest adventure. A new partner, an even newer baby daughter and a decent-ish job replacing the uncertainties of his own small business in the shaky years of post-Thatcher Britain. It's time to settle down, isn't it? . . . Isn't it?
Roll the clock forward almost 20 years. You see the same man, now in his late 50's, his cup overflowing with the love and affection of those who surround him, but his job's deserted him and there's a feeling that all is not quite right with this particular corner of his garden of earthly delights. There's a kind of black pigeon-hole, marked 'unfinished business', which is supposed to hold all of youth's unconsumated dreams.
But it's empty. After all, it's a black hole. It's in the job description. Where do things that fall into black holes go to? . . . Ah-ha! The loft, of course! And, of course, the subject here is me.
My loft did have a light that I'd installed for access and storage purposes when we'd first moved in, but even replacing the 60-watt bulb with a 100-watt one, hardly illuminated the all-consuming void past the first stack of corrugated boxes. This was the one containing every (or very nearly every) weekly copy of Autosport from 1967 to 1991. Then a little case containing my old 750 Motor Club magazines. Above that, some shelves carried boxes containing some of the very last things I'd raced: PB Maxima, MRX, Tamiya Egress, Schumacher CAT2000 (Cecil had been a little impatient waiting for the millennium to arrive and used the name a little early)!
But it was the next pile of boxes that stopped me in my track. A pile I knew to contain what I conveniently referred to as 'the Scalextric'. It was, in fact, a very mixed bag of various makes of 1/32 scale slot cars, along with the remnants of a 4-lane track (using the Italian Polistil track as it had ECRA standard slot depth and a little more width for room to slide without dropping a wheel over the edge) that I'd had in a mezzanine level above the sales area of my model shop in the 1980's. To ensure adequate power got through, the American Parma hand throttles were supplied with their current via a couple of 12-volt drill transformers.
The buzz was immediate. As long as you have cars, track, power-supply and friends, you don't need anything else to go racing - even its' effect on the electricity bill is negligible. Whatever else you have to shed as you go through life, NEVER PART WITH YOUR SCALEXTRIC. Like Linus' blanket, you may need it.
Three years on and I'm still here, but I now the make small performance enhancing parts for Scalextric cars, sell replacement headlamp bulbs (including right back to the miniature Edison-Screw ones in the very early Escorts and Porsches) and produce a range of handy track-cleaning tools, all of which I distribute through both eBay and my Classic Toys & Models online site and its' linked Auctiva Commerce store.
My 17 years as a model shop proprietor (see profile) had been a great experience. Although I'd been a model enthusiast ever since my first Airfix Spitfire kit at 5 years old, I learned a lot more in my years in the shop. I made a lot of friends, some of whom I still bump into in supermarkets. Every one of them still asks me when I'm coming back into the trade. The answer is I've started dabbling again, but this time it will be principally online.
I would also like to think that my experience would not be wasted, so I will try to pass on some of it with a series of illustrated articles, which I hope will be of help to any of you who may be interested. I'll try to have the first one ready in the course of the coming week.
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