My Life with Machinery

I’m bouncing back at Sepia Saturday’s inspirational photo, if I can remember how to put a blog post together – the transport theme continues but this photo reminded me of my very VERY first blog from 18 August 2010…

My Dad was a farmer and he had an interest in vintage tractors and farm equipment. Over the years this became increasingly important to him and his enthusiasm seemed to be without limits. The rest of the family did not necessarily go along with this. In particular, one tractor was almost grounds for divorce… For my maiden blog, I scanned a variety of postcards which had been pinned to the wall in Dad’s office for years. I’m not sure how I ended up with them, or why I kept them, but finally they had a use – a rather dull post with only a minor breakthrough of humour at the very end. No one read it and no one commented on it, but don’t feel sorry for me – was I discouraged? Noooooo! For insomniacs, you will join the other 411 people who are still sleeping it off after reading it sometime in the four years since.

I have a newspaper cutting showing Dad with the actual “grounds for divorce” piece of mechanical financial drain at the Royal Highland Show but I couldn’t put my hands on it so I googled and found a splendid and relatively glamorous version of the tatty implement Dad bought in the US and had shipped all the way back to the UK. You can imagine my Mum’s total jubilation.

“Advance Rumely Oil Pull” by Doug Coldwell – Own work. Licensed under CC BY-SA 3.0 via Wikimedia Commons – http://bit.ly/1FXPsbp

Such was Dad’s love of this soot-spewer that we kids had our annual “family photo” taken with it. Again, deep joy and happiness, rust streaks on the good dress and tears before bedtime. And that was just my mother. You can just imagine 4 well-dressed and scrubbed children pretending to look overjoyed at their annual photography punishment.

However, all this exposure to mucky, noisy farm equipment must have had an effect on me because I seem to have been surrounded by things on wheels ever since. My racing pram obviously came first (and well before the days of the Rumely) but I was starting off on the right track, as it were.  Fellow Sepians will have read about my pram in Sepia Saturday 134 but here it is to remind you.

The years rolled by, I leapt on and off motorbikes at every opportunity, travelled in and drove some terrible death traps.  The cars rolled by and finally I was 21. I didn’t want the big party and the fuss so the Mechanical Genius came up with his best idea yet. This..

I couldn’t have wished for a better 21st birthday present. It had superwide wheels, a white leather steering wheel and rather attractive brown nylon upholstery. Yay, me!

Thousands of happy miles and numerous cars later, I chanced upon this outside a bar in Tenerife and it made my holiday, as you can see…

Mainly because it was a break from the kind of industrial equipment I was working with at the time.

Another few years down the line and it was time to pretend to be sensible but I had a special guest on my wedding day, and even Mum thought it was funny. My favourite of Dad’s collection – his 3 wheeled John Deere.

I’ve written numerous other posts which include vehicles of one kind or another, but my favourite is probably the post for Sepia Saturday 101  which shows some photos from Great Granny’s album.  It’s mildly amusing and a couple of those photos led me to do a little research on cars made in Scotland by ladies for ladies – now there’s something I heartily approve of!

Get your skates on and whizz over to see what the other Sepia Saturday contributors made of this week’s prompt.

Jo