The Trabant Driver

Aktuelle Kamera

2007-10-31T14:17:00.000Z

We interrupt our stimulating coverage of the third annual awards ceremony of the machine tool manufacturers' kombinat from Halle, to bring you this most distressing news:

"At dawn today our security services, the sword and shield of our party, noticed that Comrade Steeplejack was missing from his post in the planning directorate for the seventh quarter of the eleventh Five Year Plan. Comrades noticed that Steeplejack had been behaving oddly for some time and was less than committed as in previous times to the party's task.

Distressingly, it now seems that he has betrayed our workers' and farmers' republic. Our latest information from the people's satellite "Sigmund Jahn" has yielded the following photograph:

It seems that Comrade Steeplejack had fallen into the pay of renegade agents from the Socialist Federal Republic of Yugoslavia, and was spirited over the border in a second hand Yugo 513."

Accordingly, our erstwhile comrade and now callously treacherous Titoist running dog, Hoxhaite deviationist and Bonapartist indivdualist has now been declared persona non grata in the DDR and has had his citizenship revoked. Until, that is, he buys another Trabant.

We now re-join proceedings in Halle where excitement is reaching fever pitch ahead of the announcement of the "Most Promising New Comrade in the VEB Kondomfabrik Frankfurt-an-der-Oder" award...

*********************************************************************

Sadly, folks, I just couldn't get the BARKAS insured. The last straw came when my friend and co-driver, Comrade Taylor, who has had a clean license for many years, couldn't get insured on it. I'm afraid that at that point, rather than displaying the steely resolved demanded by the Montrose and Tayside SED, I simply gave up the ghost.

However a replacement has quickly been found in the form of my new Yugo 513. There really aren't many Yugos of any kind left, but this one has relatively few miles on the clock, and I snapped it up at the bargain-basement price of £150 on e-bay (I think I was rather fortunate that the ending of the auction coincided with England appearance in the rugby world cup final.)

Comrade Taylor and I drove it back from Avonmouth the other day and it went like an absolute bomb- for an Eastern bloc car it is very fast and handles very well, even if it does look like a slowly melting pat of butter. The gears are a bit sloppy, and the exhaust is somewhat cracked, so the motor is in KwikFit at the moment being fixed up. The crack in the exhaust saw the Yugo produced a noise that was somewhere in between a Jaguar E-Type and a distempered walrus bellowing in pain.

I'm not sure if I'll be blogging about it, though. This place will stay open and I will continue if there is enough interest. We shall see!

Blowing the dust off

2007-10-11T10:29:00.000+01:00

Hello readers!

It's been two months since I lasted posted on here, and readers expecting a joyously lengthy jamboree of prolix piffle about the trip up from London will have been sorely disappointed.

No, I haven't died, nor, worse that that, was I denounced by a member of the Montrose, Angus & Tayside branch of the SED to the Stasi and subsequently "disappeared" or "left for voluntary exile and renounced citizenship of the DDR".

Simply, I haven't been able to pick the BARKAS up, just yet.

Tediously, in August, the entire German motor registration department went on holiday at the same time, causing a delay in the delivery of a registration plate. Even more tediously, now the two stroke motorised greenhouse has got a registration plate, no bugger will insure it. The reason? It has a foreign registration plate. ordinarily this wouldn't have caused a problem, but apparently, now, the DVLA are having a crackdown on foreign licensed cars. Unless you can prove that you are resident abroad (I'm not, yet) they now insist that the car is registered on a UK license plate even if, as is the case with me, you intend to disappear and not come back in the near future. Add that to the fact that i still only have a provisional license (thereby ruling me out of specialist classic car insurance schemes which all seem to demand a 19 year full driving license and unsullied no claims bonus) and you have a problem.

I am currently working around this and chatting to the seller who, thankfully, is relaxed enough about it. The latest pick up date is in the last week of October so, we shall see. Sadly, trying to get this old bucket insured makes insuring the Trabant seem like a walk in the park. In the longer term, I think i will have to register it in the UK simply to have it insured properly. the problems of insuring old and rare vehicles in an increasingly paranoid country is the only time when I look with envy at the owners of modern character free windtunnel fertislised electronic cigar tubes. I have also been looking back rather enviously at the ease of having a Trabi to hand.

So, bear with me, I hope to be back soon. I need this bus anyway; I have a scholarship to go to Estonia for half of next year, and who knows if i will ever be back. I am hoping to be over there at the beginning of next June with the bulk of my stuff, and the other half's stuff, in tow, so a BARKAS is necessary to that enterprise.

Fingers crossed, i will update with a more interesting post at the end of this month. In the meantime, any insurance advice or insurers willing to insure me out there, get in touch.

Barkas Driver's 5-Day Plan

2007-08-03T10:38:00.000+01:00

So the plan to retrieve the Barkas is taking shape. After intensive discussion and negotiation amongst the trade unions and factory committees, a collective of three- five (to be confirmed) comrades are heading to London towards the end of next week to fulfil the heroic goal of the 5-day plan, namely bringing the Barkas back to Scotland.

The plan has been meticulously drawn up to the last detail by state experts, featuring the following elements:

1. Head to London via GNER (probably arriving five hours late owing to a faulty buffet car coffee machine short circuiting the entire East Coast line between Newcastle and Grantham- the problems and iniquities of hyper-capitalism)

2. Spend Friday and Saturday on "fraternal delegations" to, er, the National Gallery and "Fabric"

3. Minimise hangover on Sunday by intensive ingestion of energy drinks and a pre packed stash of Irn Bru. Pick up Barkas by 10am

4. Drive back up north with a sub-committee in the back responsible for in-Barkas people's entertainment (ingestion of Bollinger and absinthe, suspension-shaking dub reggae & drimnbass, 'convenience stop' somewhere around Nottingham if that proves to be too lethal a two-stroke alcoholic mixture)

5. Meanwhile the other sub-committee takes reponsibility for alcohol free delivery of the driving quota of the plan (Comrades Steeplejack and "Tatty" Taylor)

6. Arrive back in Dundee around 10pm.

My next entry, therefore, in about ten days time, will be a full Aktuelle Kamera two hour special covering the trip in detail. It will be my first substantial entry on this blog since the "Plastic Dart" exited stage left and, after that, we should be smoking away as normal on here. I'm hugely looking forward to it!

Aktuelle Kamera

2007-07-08T12:25:00.000+01:00

Today the GDR government-in-exile was pleased to announce that the Special Extraordinary Committee for Barkas Inquiry has located a working example of the camper van, in reasonable condition and at a reasonable price.

Economic Secretary Gunther Mittag will shortly begin negotiations to secure this heroic product of the VEB Barkaswerke, Karl-Marx-Stadt (now LIDL's and the Chemnitz FC Club Shop) for the services of our Comrade and First Secretary of the Jute Socialist Unity Party, Steeplejack. Rumours that Mittag's initial very generous offer of twenty Marlboro Lights, a packet of stale 'Mocca Fix Gold' chicory, and a bag of Irn Bru sweeties, in return for the van, were dismissed by the Free German Press Association as the work of capitalist-fascist agent provocatuers from the West. As we all know the Jute SED has never been more prosperous and efficient at meeting the targets of its five year plan, nor have the workers and farmers of the Montrose and Dundee collectives been happier, ahem.

Once the negotiations have been successfully concluded Mittag will welcome a delegation from the Jute SED and the People's University, where a collective of comrades will transfer the vehicle back to Scotland, with crossed fingers, a nervously clasped AA membership card, their raw anxiety masked in a dense fug of blue oil smoke. Aktuelle Kamera will closely monitor this heroic feat in real time, as it happens.

In other news, Dynamo Berlin surprisingly won the Oberliga Championship when every single member of their final-day opponents squad were arrested by the Ministry of State Security for "rightist deviation and Bonapartist individualism". With no-one to play against, they were awarded 700 extra points and the title. The Minister for Sport congratulated Dynamo on their highly deserved and fairly won league title, stating that "This happens in football everywhere. Spies, Trotskyites and Wreckers do not deserve to win the football championship of our workers' and farmers' state."

In Berlin today our comrade and chairman of the Council of State, Erich Honecker, welcomed a delegation of folk singers from the Moldavian Soviet Socialist republic....

Heute Es Besteht Keine Nachrichten

2007-06-20T10:14:00.000+01:00

Well, quite a break from scribing on this organ, but there's not been too much to say.

I'm still not that much further forward with the Barkas hunt. As mentioned earlier the vehicles are rather rare in the UK. I have established contact with a man in London who's selling his, but the process may take a while to complete- we'll just have to wait and see. There are logisitical problems, in that I will have to take someone to Wembley with me in order to bring this particular "Cup" back up the M1 and M90. Moreover, i am on the point of moving into a new flat in Dundee at the beginning of August, which will mean that cashflow for a new motor is likely to be severely restricted until the end of the summer.

On that front, it's good not to be knocking out £100+ quid per month in insurance for a car that only gets driven once in a blue moon, but I still do miss the Trabant. If the Barkas option falls through (and at the moment it does seem to be a prospect about as likely as Gordon Brown holding a referendum on the EU Constitution), I will have little alternative but to source another "plastic dart" in my pursuit of the charmed chalice of a full driving licence. There are several which look in pretty reasonable nick for under 500 Euros on German e-bay at the moment. I've never been that much of a fan of "pimped" Trabis; you know, Kombis turned into mock cement mixers, Trabant Jeeps restyled in the shape of a pina colada with exotic fruit, knackered 601s re-engined with a 6-litre V12, giving them the average speed of a Spitfire on take-off. Maybe as a historian I'm a stickler for authenticity, even if the authentic Trabant is somewhat less exciting than the variants mentioned above.

So in the absence of a Trabant to tell you about, I've been away in Durham watching England thrashing a dismal West Indian side at cricket and beginning to plan for the flit to Jute City; I've also been planning another trip to Estonia for the second half of August where once again I hope to augment my knowledge of the Baltic tongue and set up a few more things out there. Sadly my ZAZ purchase mentioned in February has fallen through; my friend needed the money for her move to Greece, where she has established close diplomatic relations with an Albanian man. So the ZAZ which once had been earmarked for myself is now an "offroader" with an Estonian farmer in Viljandimaa; apparently the man uses it for mushroom picking expeditions, and for supervising the growth of his potatoes. This is the fate of many ZAZs, apparently, in rural Estonia; the car is frankly too embarrassing for most Estonians to be seen in on the republic's highways, although used offroad still as a toy, or for light duties. Probably just as well, then, from my point of view, although a few good ZAZs are for sale on the on-line site soov.ee, so I'm not totally giving up on that one yet.

Hopefully we'll be back motoring by September, frankly we'll need to be, otherwise this blog stands a good chance of atrophying through lack of things to say.

Ae Fond Farewell

2007-06-10T12:47:00.001+01:00

Trabant prepared for long journey north

And so the Trabant has gone. The car went for £420 on e-bay, which I was reasonably pleased with, and the man picked it up this morning to trailer it away to its new home in the Highlands. It was a sad moment indeed as it disappeared away down the High Street.

Last weekend I did take the machine for a final smoky jaunt up the A92 to Stonehaven. The car had been standing still for quite a long time, so we were through St. Cyrus before the engine had warmed up enough to take fourth gear. The roads were extremely quiet, so i had space and time to nurse it up to 95km/h on the approach to 'Stoney'. It was a journey full of memories from last year and I'm glad I did it.

Anyway, we build socialism by marching forward together, or something, so hopefully my next entry will have news of a more concrete nature on the Barkas front.

Last glimpse of an Old pal

Estonia 0-1 Croatia

2007-06-04T14:01:00.001+01:00

As expected yet more brutal pish in Tallinn this weekend, as Estonia's search for a goal, let alone a point in a competitive game, stretches to well over a year. Their latest defeat came in a narrow single goal reverse at home to Croatia, who look well placed to qualify from a group bereft of exciting games or much incident. Da Silva (good Croatian surname that) netted a well taken goal just after half an hour to leave the hapless Estonians jousting with Andorra for the group's wooden spoon. I shall be wearing my Estonian jersey on Wednesday as the gallant Balts line up against England but, really, anything other than a comfortable win for the English, and Steve McLaren really does deserve the sack. The few bright notes were the debut performance of young Vladimir Voskoboinikov (I can see that arsehole Jonathan Pearce having great fun with that name during Wednesday night's commentary) and another prolonged string of fine saves from Mart Poom in goal. Slaven Bilic, the Croatian coach, said that Satuday was Estonia's best performance of the group to date: aye, right, maybe if you were a Croatian that is.

The pisspoor Andorrans are visitors to the A. le Coq Stadium in Tallinn in August. A real festival of international incompetence is guaranteed, and I shall be in Tallinn then, doing another language course, so those readers interested (tortoiseshell, Edge and "Aberdeen Mo") can look forward to a verbose account of this game between two of Europe's worst teams sometime around then. It's so bad that if I end up in Estonia and take out citizenship, you may see listed in their no. 9 shirt in a few years time a strangely named player: 9-Steeplejack (Montrose FC).

Euro 2008 so far: Estonia P6 W0 D0 L6 F 0 A 11 Pt 0

Auction News : Brief Barkas History

2007-06-02T16:44:00.000+01:00

So bidding is underway for the 'Plastic Dart' on e-bay. There are quite a few 'watchers' registered so I'm hopeful that the rserve price will be met, even if no one seems tempted by the "buy now" price of £600. I may take the little smoking rocket for a valedictory jaunt up the coastline tonight, if I do then I shall let you know how it went in my next entry.

Beautifully re-built 1971 Barkas Camper

However, I should have a reasonable warchest with which to enter the Barkas market in the coming weeks. I've had one or two good tips on where to find a decent Barkas in the UK and am hopeful of tying up a deal for one of these extraordinary two stroke eggboxes in the nearest of futures. I have also had a lot of encouragement and decent from fellow members of the IFA-UK club, always useful when one only has a vague idea of the scale of the next project. Alas I have been comprehensively outbid for the very nice looking Mansfield Barkas on e-bay, but there are other East German irons in the fire. I've also had some really nice comments from people worried that the end of my Trabant will of necessity mean the end of this blog. As I intend to buy another knackered Trabant and do it up as a hobby once in Berlin, the blog will be keeping its name and will certainly keep going as long as people find it interesting and fun to read. However, the focus for the next twelve months will be on the Barkas camper.

Very late VW-engined Barkas built November 1990

There are a few of you out there no doubt wondering, "What the hell is a Barkas?" Actually, the story of the Barkas is remarkably similar to the Trabant, even if the van is much less well known. I must confess that I had never heard of these vehicles until I joined the Trabant UK club last year.

After the war, the old Framo lorry works in Chemnitz found itself in the Soviet occupied zone and was quickly nationalised by the new Communist government. From 1949, when the DDR was founded, until 1961, this place churned out pre-war Framo lorries of various kinds, whilst Chemnitz itself was renamed Karl-Marx-Stadt. By the end of the 1950s, when the DDR had rebuilt itself sufficiently to begin producing goods of a non-essential variety, the factory was rebranded "VEB Barkaswerke" and turned its collective mind to the production of a flexible small commercial van. From 1961 onwards, when production at the re-named people's owned collective began, if you needed a van in the DDR, you got a Barkas.

The Barkas Workforce on their last day, 10 April 1991

The B1000, powered by an adapted Wartburg engine of 992 cc, remained in production until 1990. It was briefly replaced by the B1000-1, powered by a license built VW Golf engine before, as at Zwickau and Eisenach, the factory was obliged to close, owing to the collapse of the former East German market, and hugely uneconomic production costs. It seems almost absurd to have a commercial vehicle powered by so small an engine, but the Barkas quickly became well liked for being reasonably reliable, adaptable and quite good fun to drive. Even a two stroke version, loaded with people plus their goods and shackles, will splutter along happily at 80 km/h, with a top speed of around 95 km/h being possible. As with the Trabant, owners confirm that the bus is great to drive and surprisingly nippy in town driving conditions.

Whilst both the Eisenach and Zwickau factories both had radically altered lives in post-unification Germany, I've not been able to find out what happened to the old Barkas site, if it is still making things, or whether it has been bulldozed and replaced by a shopping mall. In summer 1990 Karl-Marx-Stadt reverted to its old name of Chemnitz, and the Barkas concern had a ghostly final ten months or so as "Barkas GmbH Chemnitz". Just over 177,700 Barkai of all types were made in those thirty years, with exports being to Poland, Hungary, the USSR and the former Czechoslovakia.

Radio DDR's intrepid globetrotting newshound claims "30,000kms without a defect".
I'll settle for that!

There were an incredible variety of Barkai produced for the different uses of a commercial van. All the DDR emergency services and armed forces used them in various guises, and old 'Feuerwehr' Barkas vans still appear regularly on German e-bay. They were also in the sinsiter employ of the Stasi, with disguised Barkai being employed to snatch "offenders" from the street and convey them to the nearest grim Secret Police dungeon for an unspecified period. It's a vaguely sobering thought that many East Germans' last glimpse of freedom, would have been through the hastily shutting sliding door of a Stasi Barkas.

Most though had a very ordinary existence, lugging stuff about all day, taking families and youth clubs camping, sports teams to away fixtures, and, as the Wall fell, smoking across the previously uncrossable border into West Berlin. There was the occasional celebrity Barkas sent on a state licensed globe trotting mission in the 1970s, including one which went all the way to South Asia via the Middle East. The demands of this intrepid propaganda exercise meant that the number of breakdowns etc en route were not recorded for posterity, which is a shame, as such an expedition would have sat well alongside much more recent stories of Trabants driving to the Gambia, London Taxis to Outer Mongolia, etc.

Celebrity Barkas in the Himalayas, 1970s

Since the vehicle ceased production, as with other DDR era machines, many disappeared or have been scrapped. With the rise of 'Ostalgie' from the late 1990s onward, however, many have enjoyed a complete restoration and renaissance. It's possible to buy a pretty wrecked Barkas, with a rusty body and rustier motor, for around 400 euros. Many have subsequently had five times that sum spent on them to bring them back to showroom condition. of course the Barkas doesn't enjoy the cult status of the Trabi, but the same network dedicated to maintaining the "Plastic Dart" as a viable car also turns its hand to Wartburg and Barkas maintenance. Full sets of spares are available still from the redoubtable LDM-Tuning at the same reasonable prices. Obviously I don't have the time or funds to do up a wreck, so I'm looking at spending more to get an example in good working order. I'd reckon that there can't be more than twenty-five Barkas vans currently in the UK, with possibly none licensed north of the border.

The last ever Barkas, 10 April 1991

So that's enough Eamonn Andrews style "Barkas- This Is Your Life". I shall be back sometime later next week to round off the story of my Trabant sale, and hopefully with some more concrete information on the new Barkas that will be conveying myself and my comrades on a flying Persian carpet of blue oily smoke to Berlin next year. Game on!

(All the photos in this entry come from the excellent Barkas fan site based in Germany- sadly you won't get much out of it other than the pictures, unless you can read German).

Roll Up! Roll UP!

2007-05-29T12:37:00.000+01:00

Those of you wishing to bid on my C-List celebrity Trabant can now do so here. Sad, sorry, ineitable, but I shall keep y'all posted.

End of an Era

2007-05-28T11:40:00.000+01:00

Well, sadly, the time has come for me and the dear old "plastic dart" to part company.

The car is parked down by the harbour at the moment and I have been so busy at work in the last month that there has simply been no time at all to take it out. This also explains the rather irregular updates on this blog.

Yesterday I retreived it from its bolt hole and washed three weeks worth of seagull incontinence off the body work, then drove it back. That (2kms worth) has been the only time the car has turned a wheel since my return from Europe.

I hate economists, accountants and the philistine, bottom-line obsessed ways of business, generally, but cold facts have to be faced. I am currently shelling out over £100 a month to insure a car who's current main function is a public convenience for seabirds. Clearly even for a financial illiterate such as myself, this is not sustainable.

So, shortly, the car is going up for sale, hopefully to a good home whose occupants will drive it as much as I did in 2006. However, this is far from being the end of the autobahn for my involvement with the weird products of the DDR's car collectives, more of that in a wee bit.

It's the end of an era away from the road, too; in a month's time I shall be leaving Montrose for a new home in Dundee. I won't really need a car there as I am moving to a place near my work, and to be honest I'd be worried about the little get being molested by marauding drunks staggering home at 3 am. My spell in Jute City will only last for a year, however, as next summer I will be away to Europe for good. Likely so many people from the UK in their 30s and early 40s, I've really had enough of this place and it's time for a new venture and a new culture. I shall miss Montrose, however. It really is a beautiful town which doesn't make anything like as much of itself as it could, and I will miss my friends here.

The moving abroad plan has altered however. Longstanding readers of this patent drivel may remember ramblings passim. on the subject of Tallinn, and my vague musings on moving there to begin the next adventure in my life.

Two things have altered since then. Firstly, as you'll no doubt have seen on the news, Tallinn of late has become a seething cauldron of inter-ethnic indignation between the Estonians and the ethnic Russian population of the city, with three days of serious unrest last month in which a man was killed and many shops wrecked. Since the, amidst worsening relations and the scrambling of NATO computer experts to help the beleagured Estonians, accusations of the Russians waging cyber war against the Estonians have been made, in what could yet be the most serious breach in EU-Russian relations since the final collapse of the USSR in August 1991. I don't think Putin would be stupid enough to intervene militarily against an EU member at the moment, but let's just say that the latent Estonian paranoia about another Russian invasion hasn't exactly been dampened by the events of recent weeks.

Coupled with these very worrying developments in one of my favourite countries, the time in Berlin last month was extraordinarily productive. There are many possibilities and opportunities for me both personally and professionally out there, and I won't really bore you with the details. (I know how dull it is to be trapped in a room, involuntarily listening to the details of a life narrative. There was an Australian traveller on my train from Brno-Berlin, and I swear she accounted for every Euro she had spent in the EU in her six months of travelling, moaning and groaning about each slightly inflated price she had had to fork out from her not exactly anaemic wallet, to a shifting cast of fellow passengers, most of whom had fled before twenty minutes elapsed. Murder most foul was on the cards by the time we reached Berlin-Zentrum, and in blank moments I can still hear her droning, busted-nose, every-sentence-ends-in-a-question-mark Ballarat accent complaining bitterly at having to pay four Euros for an ice cream in Venice. Aaargh.) Suffice it to say that there are four of us going over to Berlin next year to get busy on a variety of creative projects. The first of us goes over in January, and I shall be there by early August 2008.

The logistics of moving abroad when one has a lot of stuff (I have a small library of books and a Royal Doulton dinner service, you know...) are nightmarish. If one entrusted one's stuff to DHL or somesuch similar a) the likelihood of it arriving late and knocked about is high and b) a lifetime's worth of dishwashing would await to pay off the several thousand euro bill which would accrue for said pisspoor service. The cheaper option therefore is to invest in a camper van. I have had some experience of these. The cliche is of course a classic 1970s VW camper. My dear friend "Filthy" used to run about in an aubergine VW camper at University, and much fun indeed was had by all in the "purple bullet" as it was known, but once they die, they really die. Poor "Filthy's" much loved bus was cashiered after experiencing terminally miserable problems with the electrics, and since then he has pursued his interest in an elegant succession of Colt sportscars. These days, one is looking at spending four-five grand for even a middling example of these classics, and that is money that I just don't have.

Where else to turn for a solution but the DDR? Once my Trabant is sold, I am buying a BARKAS camper.

If anything these vehicles are even stranger than the Trabi. It seems almost unfathomable, but they run on the same engine as a Wartburg saloon (two stroke three cylinder) and, according to a poster on the IFA messageboard, one has to "reach ape-like" behind one to reach the gear-lever. All the gears are free-wheelers and hence braking is somewhat eccentric and takes a little time to familiarise oneself with. The BARKAS looks like a 1970s Commer van, but sounds like a motorbike, and produces the smoke of a Trabant, in its two stroke incarnation.

I know that some concerned friends will already be ringing the local 24 hour mental health hotline and asking for advice about me, but it's the best idea I've come up with. Vans are expensive. A desultory search on e-bay will reveal that even battered fifteen year old Sherpas or Transits, which look on their last legs, will cost £700. For just over twice that I can get a camper which will last pretty much for ever if one pays attention to rust and regular maintenance.

In time I will return to driving a Trabant but as all my energy and financial 'muscle' is going to be turned towards this big move, it's likely that that won't be until I reach Berlin-and then it will be to the doing up of a wreck bought for two euros or some such. Hopwever, readers will be gratified to know that this blog will continue- even if technically I shan't be a Trabant Driver soon, for a little while, but will be a BARKAS driver instead.

I shall be putting up a for sale post later this week along with a note on e-bay so the next breathless instalment of this penny dreadful will be the sale of the car you have all come to know through these pages in the lats eighteen months. And, hopefully not too long after that, the introduction to another, much bigger East German vehicle.

Stay tuned....

Postscript: Hansa Rostock Promoted back to the Bundesliga

On a completely unrelated note, I was hugely delighted to see that Hansa Rostock, my German football team, won promotion back to the Bundesliga after a three season absence. Other than a few last minute fits of the screaming ab-dabs (a miserable 0-3 home defeat to Koblenz in early May springs to mind), the Ostseestadion outfit have enjoyed an excellent season, going back up as runners up of the 2.Bundesliga, behind champions Karlsruhe.

Hansa's fine season stood out as a shining example amidst an otherwise utterly hapless performance from my European football teams; Montrose had their worst season for years, Austria Vienna were awful in the T-Mobile Bundesliga in Austria, and Flora Tallinn haven't exactly covered themselves with the bouquets of success since the beginning of the Estonian Meistrliiga in March.

I may just be in Germany for the end of season 2007-8, by which time hopefully a much strengthened Hansa team will have consolidated in the notoriously difficult Bundesliga, and finished above Energie Cottbus, the other former DDR side still holding their own in the elite of German football.

Herzlichen Glückwunsch Hansa!

Quiet Week

2007-05-10T12:11:00.000+01:00

Not much to report this week; I have been very busy with other things, and the Trabant has consequently had a quiet time of it. All I've done is turn the engine over a few times, as I haven't managed to get out anywhere. That is likely to change next weekend, with the visit of a friend from Edinburgh who is interested in the car. Prospects for a driving test soon are bleak, as there is an absolutely massive waiting list for a test locally; tests are now being booked for late August, a catastrophic hiatus which would have shamed the DDR licensing authorities. I am considering booking a test elsewhere, as I don't really want to wait that long. Having failed a couple of times in Montrose, maybe a change of scene (and a change of examiner) will do me a power of good.

In DDR times, the furthest a Trabant usually got was to somewhere in the former Yugoslavia (with copious stops along the way to ensure that the engine didn't overheat and seize), or occasionally, to the USSR. There has been talk in these pages of trips from Montrose to Estonia as my life prepares to change course yet again. But one journey I've heard of recently absolutely trumps all these other varied odysseys.

Shortly, three "plastic darts" will cough their way into life in a cloudburst of oily smoke in Germany, and won't stop until they have gone all the way to Cambodia. The aim of the eight participants is to raise three hundred thousand US dollars for the street children of that country. Going under the name of Trabant Trek, they have a very decent website and flyer which will detail not only their fund-raising exploits, but also their adventures along the way. Hopefully they will achieve both their targets, and not be visited by overmuch mechanical disaster along the way. Their cause is worthy of every support so good luck from this corner of Europe to them all.

As for me, well, maybe there will be a bit more news to tell you about next week. Tschuss!

Das Leben des Anderen/The Lives of Others

2007-05-01T11:16:00.000+01:00

Having first become aware of the Life of Others about twelve months ago, when it caused a sensation on its release in Germany, I had been choking to see it ever since. The debut feature of director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, both of whose parents were from the East, has pulled in film awards by the sackload since its appearance, including an Oscar this year for the category of "Best Foreign Language Film".

The UK papers have been full of the film for weeks, giving it largely laudatory reviews. Ludicrously, the Independent suggested on Saturday that this film was spearheading a "German cinema renaissance", the journo somehow having missed the likes of Goodbye Lenin!, Aimee and Jaguar, Der Untergang and Sonnenallee from the last few years alone. The only discordant note has been sounded by the author Anna Funder, who in this month's issue of Sight & Sound has suggested that the movie is "rotten at the core"- more on this later.

The film, at two and a quarter hours, is long on paper but is so absorbing that one barely notices the passage of time. The story revolves around the surveillance of Georg Dreyman, an East German playwright. On the surface, Dreyman is loyal to the regime, but Stasi Captain Gerd Weisler suspects he is somewhat different behind closed doors. Ulrich Muehe is absolutely brilliant as Wiesler, convincingly portraying a man emotionally crippled by his work and his fanatical faith in the SED. At the beginning of the film, we see Wiesler reprimand a student in one of his lectures for empathising with the plight of a prisoner; a black mark is instantly put against the hapless student's name. It was this very human empathy that the Stasi sought to suppress in themselves and in the "Lives of Others" that they spied upon.

Throughout the detail is very convincing. The night-time streets of East Berlin are deserted and dimly lit; dissidents have to go for a walk in the park to avoid having their conversations listened into; even then, the Stasi, comically represented by a man hiding behind trees in a vaudeville style way, are ever present. Even in the cars, von Donnersmarck's research is meticulous. Wartburgs and Barkas vans are prominently featured; the repulsive culture minister, Bruno Hempf, is chauffered around in a Politburo-issue stretched Volvo.

It is Hempf's scheming which provides the early drive behind the film. We are introduced to his character at the opening of Dreyman's latest play; it transpires that Hempf is obsessed with Christa Maria Sieland (Martina Gedeck), Dreyman's lead actress and real life partner. With the acquiesence of the oily, career obsessed Stasi Lt. Col. Grubitz, Hempf hatches a plan to incriminate Dreyman and hence clear the field, and make his relationship to Sieland more secure. Some of the most uncomfortable scenes in the film involve Hempf groping a clearly unwilling Sieland in the back of his ministerial limousine. In effect, the actress has to submit to his unwelcome advances so as not to have her career finished.

This is where Capt. Wiesler comes in, as he is assigned to bug Dreyman's flat and uncover evidence to imprison him, and banish him from the stage. A team of half a dozen Stasi agents is shown bugging every part of the house, using light switches as hiding place, within a very short space of time. That evening, the surveillance begins.

The climate of suppressed and never acknowledged fear in the DDR saturates the film. Dreyman's agonising conflict of loyalties between the DDR regime and his friends is the first; Sieland's fear of Hempf, the second; Grobitz's fear of failing to deliver the goods for his boss, the third. The only nerveless character in the film is Wiesler himself, who presumably has long ago forgotten how to feel anything, other than satisfaction at carrying out "the Party's task".

Sinister Wiesler tunes in above Dreyman's flat

As the surveillance develops two things happen. Wiesler's loyalty begins to crack, as he becomes aware of Hempf's advances towards Sieland. When he makes Grobitz aware of this, his boss peremptorily dismisses the information with the words "we can't spy on government ministers- don't write anything down, just report to me verbally.". The hypocrisy of the SED regime couldn't be made any clearer. Secondly, as he is privy to the most intimate details of Dreyman and Sieland's life together, with it's rich variety, it seems that his own emotionally poor and intellectually barren existence is thrown into sharp relief.

Dreyman turns against the regime when an old, close mentor, blacklisted for many years by the SED, hangs himself in despair. Together with colleagues, Dreyman pens a damning article on suicide rates in the DDR for the West German magazine Der Spiegel, and, in some very tense scenes, ensures that it is smuggled over the Wall and into print.

Wiesler is aware of all this, naturally, but he has chosen to suppress it, as he begins to file false and misleading reports to his bosses. Hempf, enraged at the Stasi's failure to find evidence, threatenes to have Grobitz put up against a wall, and in turn the Stasi Colonel begins to suspect that Wiesler is hiding something. By this stage, it is too late for him to recant; an admission of involvement in crimes ranging from republikflucht to having a damning article published in the West means that he is as implicated as Dreyman. there is no sense in which he does want to recant, however.

Grobitz watches Wiesler interview Sieland, through a two way mirror in prison

Sieland is eventually arrested after Hempf tires of her rebuff of him; the Culture Minster leaves instructions that she is never to appear on stage again. Bundled by the Stasi into a camoflagued Barkas "Fish Van", she is packed off to the notoriously grim Hohenschoenhausen prison, and undergoes a gruelling series of interrogations. Grobitz, by now convinced that Wiesler is in on Dreyman's crimes, orders him to interrogate Sieland, in one of the film's tensest moments. Sieland eventually gives away the location of the typewriter, on which the incriminating Spiegel article has been drafted, in return for being allowed to continue acting.

The climax of the film shows Dreyman's flat being flooded by Stasi agents, all choking to find the typewriter; we realise, however, that Wiesland has beaten them to it and removed the evidence. Sieland, unable to bear her treachery, runs from the flat and is knocked over and killed in the street. At the end of the film, were a shown a post-Wende Dreyman searching his Stasi files and uncovering the way in which Wiesler had protected him; at the end, hsi new novel is shown as dedicated to "HGW XX/7", Wiesland's Stasi code. In the meantime, Wiesler, demoted brutally, is shown working as a postman in reunified Germany.

This is film at its most compelling. The parts set during the time of the DDR are monochrome and have a kind of Kieslowskian bleakness about them; I'm not sure the last few minutes were necessary or terribly convincing, however. I think that the film would have been stronger if we had been left to wonder at the fate of Wiesler and Dreyman, and would have better ended with Wiesler's demotion. Nonetheless, it's one I shall definitely go and see again before it finishes, and no doubt will wear out the DVD in years to come.

Anna Funder's lengthy article in Sight & Sound readily acknowledges the film's strenghts, but suggests that it is "rotten at the core" for a number of reasons. Firstly, she argues, the film presents a false picture as there is no record of a Stasi officer ever having "turned" in this way. (this is very questionable- the last man executed in the DDR was a Stasi man accused of having "turned"). Secondly, she argues that the transition in Wiesler's character from ruthless and cold hearted spy to human is not convincingly presented. Thirdly- and most contentiously- she argues that the film, in presenting one Stasi man in a good-ish light, gives succour to those ex-Stasi operatives still organised in Germany, seeking a retrospective whitewash of their organisation's deservedly abysmal reputation.

To me her criticism is fundamentally wrong headed. This is not a documentary, and naturally there will be a departure from the reality as it was, to some extent. If we're being picky, we could also point out that suicides peaked in the DDR in the mid 1970s, and fell away after that, certainly long before this time period of this film (c. 1983-85). But it would be churlish and curmudgeonly in the extreme to take the director to task for that. Wiesler's character is also internally consistent; the process of his turning, from his disgust at the behaviour of Hempf, through his growing interest in Sieland, to the protection of Dreyman in order not to incriminate Sieland, seems pretty straightforward. Finally, it really is hard to see how this film could give credence to the Stasi veteran's claim to have "only wanted the best" for the people it spied upon.

The organisation is shown in its full loathsome extent. Wiesler, early in the film, tries to break up the relationship between Dreyman and Sieland, by subtly revealing Hempf's intrigues; friendships are tested; monumental psychological pressure is exerted on the poor vicitms of Stasi interviews; Stasi bosses and politicians are shown as venal, corrupt, self serving and contemptuous of everything and everyone but themselves. Funder's claim in this regard strikes me as similar to the hysterical Daily Mail articles claiming that Trainspotting would encourage people to take heroin. If someone really sees the Stasi in a better light after watching this then I really would be at a loss to understand it. If ex-Stasi members are harrassing victims and trying to rehabilitate themselves publically in contemporary Germany, then that surely is a matter for the German authorities to deal with, rather than this film or its director.

With this piece portrayals of life in the DDR move well on beyond the Ostalgie of films such as Goodbye Lenin!. It will be interesting to see what follows on from this, both from von Donnersmarck and from other directors.

The Lives of Others Official Website

Fascinating BBC discussion of The Life of Others

Rotten Tomatoes.com reviews of the film

Trabant

Driving Again

2007-05-01T09:56:00.000+01:00

So this weekend I did manage about 50 miles all told, less than I'd hoped for but enough to give the "plastic dart" a good run after several weeks of standing still at the collective farm. Comrades Fiona & Giles are shortly away on an extended fraternal delegation to Brazil (negotiating better coffee prices for the workers, no doubt) so the car has been brought into town for the time being.

It always amazes me that it starts up so readily. The engine hadn't turned for three weeks so I was half expecting a battery flatter than the Fens and a frustrating day of waiting for it to charge up. However, after a few hesitant sputters, the motor roared into life and off we went!

With all the new things that have been done to it this year, the car went really, really well. It didn't take long before fourth gear became available and once engaged it purred up to 90 km/h without any difficulty at all. I'd completely forgotten, too, the attention that it attracts. On the road between the collective farm and Montrose, I'm sure one car actually doubled back and followed me for half a kilometre or so ( either a car enthusiast, or I've done something to attract the attention of the Montrose Stasi). Not to mention the crowd of Sunday shoppers pointing and laughing at the Copie, or a friend who came for a short hop and described the pride of the DDR car combine as "a dodgem".

Great to be back behind the wheel, again, and not to be worrying too much about imminent mechanical collapse (other than a mild "I hope that bloody fan's still well enough screwed on", on occasion.)

Trabant

Warsaw and After

2007-04-27T12:33:00.001+01:00

And so finally I'm back. I got home on Monday and since then have been plunged into a very busy week at work. However, I'm hoping to go for a lengthy spin in the "plastic dart" this weekend, dusting it off after nearly a month of inactivity. The little bugger has a full tank of petrol so it's high time some of that was burnt off.

Warsaw Castle, destroyed in 1944 and rebuilt in the 1960s

Warsaw was a good ending to the Grand European Tour. In some ways the Polish capital has an ineradicable air of melancholy about it; the ghosts of the past are everywhere. Warsaw was somewhere between 80-90% destroyed in the last war, with the coup de grace being delivered in 1944. Then, Stalin held back the Red Army on the bank of the River Vistula whilst the Wehrmacht destroyed the rebel Polish National Army, ensuring that a post-war Poland had little by way of resisting Communist rule, in one of the most cynical and disgusting episodes in military history.

An area of the old town has been rebuilt but Warsaw in the main is dominated by Soviet style towerblocks, cultural centres and shopping malls. There are still surprises in finding old palaces and buildings in the middle of beautiful parks, however.

In COMECON terms Warsaw is closer to Tallinn than to Prague & Brno. Most of the old Eastern bloc cars have disappeared, to be replaced by Audis, Beamers and Chelsea Tractors. I did see a couple of Trabi 1.1s, both seemingly in pretty good nick, but by far the most ubiquitous old car is the FSO 126; based on the Fiat 126, this car is actually a good deal shorter than its Italian template, making it an absolute deathtrap in any accident involving it and a third party bigger than a flea. FSO made the car shorter, apparently, to preserve scarce supplies of steel for the bigger FSO 125, and the Polonez, which is still also popular.

A few days in Berlin

2007-04-19T22:36:00.000+01:00

Beautiful thickly wooded valley on the Czech-German border

As my trip progresses time is beginning to slip past like a nuclear-powered comet. It seems hard to believe that in a few days I shall be back in my office in Scotland.

Or it may be that I have just enjoyed Berlin so much. This has been my first visit to the German capital and as you'd expect of the scribe of an organ such as this, I've spent all of it in the former East Berlin.

The Palast der Republik being dismantled

The whole place crackles with the incredible energy that comes from massive rebuilding programmes. On the one hand, this has produced amazing new buildings such as the cathedral of glass and steel that is the new Hauptbanhof station. On the other, and more controversially, the old East German parliament, the Palast der Republik, is a gutted skeleton and will soon no longer be with us. This brutalist concrete and glass structure, home to the rubber stamp Volkskammer in DDR times, now stands like a giant whale skeleton in the centre of the city, with the ghosts of Honecker, Stoph, Mielcke and Mittag not having too much more time to rattler about in their old stomping ground, until it is levelled completely. For many East Germans, this demolition provides further evidence of the former West's arrogance towards them, and the desire to eradicate the DDR state from history as much as is possible. The plan is to re-create the Hohenzollern palace that used to stand in the site of the Palast der Republik, which Staatsratsvorsitzender Walter Ulbricht had dynamited in 1950, convinced that there was no place in his new socialist society for such an old imperialist relic. The reconstruction of the Hohenzollern building is very controversial and likely to be prohibitively expensive, so expect the troubled history of this part of the capital to rumble on for some time to come.

The Palast der Republik in the late 1980s

However, if the more paranoid fears of some that there is an agenda to forget that the DDR ever existed, then as long as the excellent DDR Museum exists (roughly 200 yards from the Palast by the River Spree on Karl-Liebknecht Strasse) such hopes will surely be thwarted. I paid a visit there today, it's a modern, tidy place which tells a fascinating story about the defunct state, from the point of view of the ordinary citizen living and working there. The Museum is fairly small but the curators have made the most of the limited space they have with a very intelligent set of displays. The exhibits range from the laugh-out-loud-funny (East German nudist camping), to the workaday (the re-creation at the back of the space of a typical DDR living room and kitchen), to the very sinister (the work of the Stasi and their Mitarbeiter informants. Pride of place is given to a factory condition Trabant 601 deluxe at the front of the museum, where the visitor can enjoy a simulated "drive" through a relentlessly grim high rise landscape. The emphasis is on interactivity, with people being encouraged to pick up objects and examine them for themselves, which is unusual.

Entrance to the DDR Museum

Comrades Croy and Spartwasser of the footballer's collective get ready
to overfulfil their 5 Year Plan by pumping West Germany in the 1974 World Cup Finals

Immaculate Trabi de-luxe in the Museum

Elsewhere, it's been a very fertile visit in terms of ideas and possibilities for the future. Not only that, but Berlin is a place where one can have an uninterrupted seventy two hour bender and nobody will turn a hair. Amidst all the relentless rebuilding of the newly unified city, there is a very relaxed and calm atmosphere socially, quite unlike other capitals such as London or Paris. My friend Arnar the Icelander staggered out of a grimy back street gin shop here, at 7am the other morning; the doorman presented him with a pair of Honecker-esque sunglasses, to shield his stinging eyes from the rising sun. Needless to say, as a responsible taxpayer, I had long since crashed in flames by then, but it was a nice touch.

Alexanderplatz in the gloaming

There is still a real architectural divide here. In the former East Berlin the street and traffic lights are largely still DDR vintage; the commercial centre of the old divided capital is a phalanx of Communist apartment blocks and shops, with the odd pre-1939 building hanging on grimly as a reminder of an even older Berlin. As with other Central and Eastern European capitals, it's discomfiting to see these buildings transformed with commercial signs and adverts, rather like encountering one's grandmother wearing a Run DMC hoodie to a WI committee meeting.

However the Trabant, iconic symbol of the DDR, is conspicuous by its absence on the streets of Berlin, amking the legislation to ban them from the capital's centre appear stunningly pointless (see rants passim.) I saw one 1.1, and no 601s, during my time here.

Berlin is also Knut-daft at the moment. Knut? Not a mulleted old pop stager on the come back trail, but a polar bear cub at Berlin zoo. The bear is the symbol of Berlin, one encounters stuffed bears of varying sizes and colouring everywhere here, so maybe that is why the papers seem so obsessed by him. Two German tabloids that I looked at tonight devoted four page spreads to his current health and activities. The Berliner-Zeitung produced a 72 page Royal Wedding style supplement devoted entirely to the bear, and toy Knuts are being bought in vast quantities for small children captivated by his story. Knut was rejected by his mother at birth, and an environmentalist provoked consternation and outrage, in suggesting that he should be killed, as that was the law of nature and he would not have survived had he been in the wild. Since that grumbling in the media's lower intestine, Knut has become a massive Big Brother style-celebrity, without the obvious neuroses or moronic tendencies, and seems set to become the most famous bear since the late Hercules, who lived on a farm in Scotland. If there's time before I trundle eastwards to Warsaw tomorrow, I might pop in and see the little creature for myself.

On that subject, it's high time I went to bed. See you all next week after Warsaw!

Trabant

Czech Jottings

2007-04-16T13:21:00.000+01:00

Austro-Hungarian Apartment Block in Central Brno

So I've been here for a week now in the Czech Republic, and it is high time I updated this blog.

The weather has been bakingly hot here, as I believe it has been in the UK. So I now have a thoroughgoing suntan to go along with the great time that I've had here. In the last seven days, from my base in Brno, I've been to Prague and Ostrava, the little town of Moravsky Krumlov, as well as to the excellent Tatra Museum in Koprivnice.

Ancient Skoda 1000 in Ostrava

In contrast to Estonia, the Czech Republic is still an absolute goldmine for fans of old COMECON cars. The much derided Skoda Estelle, for sale at rock bottom prices in the UK in the 1980s, can still be seen here in great numbers- the trusty old Estelle is the third most driven car in the Czech Republic, behind the newer Fabia and Octavia. Some of them are still in pretty good nick, so they can't possibly have been as bad as the music hall jokes of the 80s suggested. How many of the supposedly "better" 1980s Escorts, Cortinas and Cavaliers does one still see on the UK's roads today?

Very tatty Wartburg "Tourist" with ludicrous seat covers, in Prague

There are also plenty of "plastic darts" and a smaller number of Wartburgs in evidence. UK ex-pats that I've met suggest that there are increasingly fewer numbers of them here compared with ten years ago, but there must be around 250-500 still on the road here in this medium sized city. On my way in here today, I was startled as a Trabi, coloured the same as a 1970s olive bathroom suite, hurtled past me down a steep hill, pop-popping away as the driver freewheeled in fourth gear.

The darts I've seen have been in varied condition. One or two are "pimped" with nonsensical tiger stripe seat covers, and go-faster spoilers and alloy wheels. Others have had a hard life, evidently, and are looking very tatty and run-down.

Prague Trabi in very decent nick

Casual visitors to this site may be thinking "What a sad bastard, goes on holiday and spends his time taking photos of clapped out old motors" Far from it!

Archaic sundial outside the Alphonse Mucha Museum in Moravsky Krumlov

In the few days that I've been here I have managed to get to to the tremendous National Gallery in Prague, five floors of Czech art and a tremendous representation of modernist painting and sculpture from Austria, Germany and France. On Saturday last, I went to Ostrava, an interesting old industrial city in Czech Silesia, which these days functions in part as a kind of Central European Ibiza. Saturday evening was spent in a Pilsner-Urquell haze, on Stodolni Street, the still point at the centre of the Silesian bacchanal vortex. We ended up in a nightclub stuffed with Czech supermodels and featuring a revolving dancefloor, which alas was experiencing a "Trabant moment" and was out of commission. The music, a kind of bass-y rumbling with eurodisco and techno mixed in, was absolutely great. The supermodels? Nice, too, but I only looked.

The night before had been spent in an excellent club night in Brno featuring the magnificent French hard techno duo dDamage, sort of like a speeded up Underworld on crack, and jumping around to Love Will Tear Us Apart by Joy Division next door.

Poor "Edge" struggling with a brutal time-traveller in Koprivnice

On Saturday, en route to Ostrava, "the Edge" and I stopped off amidst the strictly Communist-era towerblocks and heavy industry of Koprivnice. I'm not usually one for car museums, and the Edge was in even less good shape, trailing smoke and flames after too many Starobrnos and a vat of red wine at the aforementioned Brno club night.

However, this was a fascinating place. The Tatra must be simultaneously one of the most beautiful and weird cars ever produced. The iconic Tatra 603 is a strange visual cross between a 1950s imagining of a spaceship, an old fashioned dodgem deluxe, and a shapely wedge of pungent Czech cheese.

Tatra 603 racer....

...and 603 saloon prototype

Apparently driving one is like piloting an ocean liner. Amongst the cars on show was a 1951 Tatraplan convertible made for Stalin's 70th birthday (the paranoid dictator never travelled in it) and a quite absurd snowmobile on skis, powered by a giant pusher-propellor. If you ever make it over here you should definitely pay a visit. I'd love to own a Tatra one day, and I know of one other member of the UK Trabi club who is a Tatra fanatic, but they do seem to be becoming increasingly rare, alas. I didn't see any of these strange four-wheeled biomorphic sculptures on the road in the Czech republic- only in this museum.

Tatra snowplough: a passenger carrying duckbilled platypus

The only slight disappointment overall has been Prague. Undoubtedly the Czech capital is a beautiful place, but even in midweek, after the easter weekend, it was absolutely choked with tourists, and the city centre has turned into a giant globalised tourist orientated theme park. Maybe the majority do want to be able to visit Marks & Sparks or Tesco eveywhere from Kirkcaldy to Kuala Lumpur, but it was kind of sad to see these giant British stores in prominent positions in a foreign capital. That's only Prague though. Places such as Brno and Ostrava have much more of a Czech feel to them. What is interesting is that every Czech town still has strong architectural echoes of it's history as part of the Austro-Hungarian empire. Beautiful apartment blocks and public buildings from that era are everywhere, many still with the Hapsburg double headed eagle visible on them.

Ghostly Hapsburg Monarchy eagle, opposite Charles Bridge

So, things have gone well here; tomorrow marks a long train journey to Berlin, the third stage of my Grand European tour. But, I'll definitely be back to the Czech Republic in the future, it's been really great. I'm also planning a visit to neighbouring Slovakia later in the summer, to see Bratislava and maybe have more luck with a sighting of the Lesser Spotted Tatra.

Sculpture on Prague's Charles Bridge, over the River Voltava, with
Hradcany Castle in the distance

Trabant

Bits & Pieces

2007-04-04T17:22:00.000+01:00

Hmmn, well I'm still having no luck with passing my driving test. I had what could charitably be described as a shocker in the latest attempt, my worst test yet. I am most annoyed; I can drive fine, but as soon as I sit in my instructor's car alongside a middle aged man in a fluorescent bib and hear the words "drive on when you're ready", I rather go to pieces. Maybe some Mogadon is in order before the next test, whenever that is.

No further adventures in the "plastic dart" to report; I simply haven't had time, as I've been tidying things up at my work before my jaunt abroad over Easter. Happily, however, the sound file from my recent Radio Belgrade interview has arrived, I just have to work out how to put up a sound file on this blog, and you can hear me underneath a Serb translation in all my brief glory. It should be something to look forward to; it's always rather alarming to hear one's own disembodied voice, and I sound like the twisted lovechild of Loyd Grossman and Malcolm Rifkind MP.

Those of you who mine the comments left under successive dissolute ramblings on this organ will already have seen these, but my friend Grant has located two priceless gems on Youtube. They are both clips of film from the Trabant factory at Zwickau in the mid-late 1980s. Some truly appalling crimes against hair can be witnessed, with most Zwickau workers favouring a Terry Mac -style mullet & muzzie tonsoral intervention. As Grant points out, the "quality control" clip is absolutely hilarious; grumpy bootings of trucculent doors and "radiator" panels; random, pointless batterings of nothing in particular with rubber hammers. Here's the links- enjoy!

Assembly Line Blues
Grumpy Buggers at Zwickau "Quality Control"

Traffic on this site has also been pretty good recently, with a little bit of exposure as a result of the Trabi's "50th birthday" a few weeks ago. The site now gets between 30-50 visitors a day, from all across Europe and the US, with one or two regulars from Australia and NZ. Good to see you all!

Back sometime next week with an update from the Czech Republic.

Smokin'

2007-03-31T17:20:00.000+01:00

And so, after an incredibly frustrating off road period of nearly two months, the two stroke atrocity is back in my custody, and sputtering around the back roads of Angus again.

There are long faces at the Commissariat for the People's Finances as I'm now £500 lighter, having re-taxed the car again, and paid the garage bill. Still, as they used to say in the DDR, we build socialism by marching forward together. In a heroic effort of truly Stakhanovite proportions, perhaps meriting a mention for the coveted "Adolf Hennecke" medal for overfulfilment of the five year plan, the garage has done quite a bit; fixed the suspension; fixed mis-aligned front brakes; put in new seat belts and indicators.

I went for around 20kms. worth of sea trials today, in and around Brechin. The car is running much better after its extended "rest" and with the new spark plugs. Fourth gear engaged no bother, the dart flew up to 88km/h (55mph) without any complaint. It's really good to have it back in circulation, although I'd begun to get used to being Trabantslos.

I'm off globetrotting again on Thursday (my Czech friend is holding out the tempting prospect of much Trabant-Wartburg related amusement in Brno next week) but hopefully there will be time for a couple of extended meanderings in the dart this week before I set off.

Estonia News

I had a really good time in Tallinn again last week, despite the Estonian football team's dismal failure to make any dent on their Russian opponents last Saturday. The Estonians look decent enough in the middle third of the field, but as soon as they approach an opponent's goal, it all collapses horribly. Sclaffs, rubber legs, unaccountable falling over for no reason, and a general cluelessness, were all in evidence. Last Saturday, during Russia's deserved 2-0 win at the A. le Coq stadium in Tallinn, it seemed as though the FSB had beamed a magnetic forcefield across the Russian goalmouth, from one of their deep space communication satellites. Russia's terrific midfielder, Arshavin, controlled the game imperiously, and the Estonians couldn't find a way to stem his subtle promptings, two of which Kerzhakov scored from. Estonia had several decent chances but just cannot score (I believe they haven't scored for well over a year now). English journalists are currently speculating on the departure of the hapless Steve McLaren, as national team boss, after his badly misfiring side travel to Tallinn in June; trust me, an Estonian win will not happen, unless the FSB transfer their magnetic forcefield to the Estonian goal (and even then, a 0-0 draw will be the result).

The upshot of my visit, other than this peripheral footballing ephemera, is that I'm defintiely going to be moving out to Estonia in summer 2008. I'm moving to Dundee for the year this summer, and when my lease on my flat there runs out, I should have work and a flat sorted somewhere in Tallinn. I had a chat with my genial hosts Adriaan and Krista about the possibility of bringing the "plastic dart" with me, and it does seem feasible. Montrose-Newcastle (350 kms.); ferry Newcastle-Gothenburg; drive Gothenburg-Stockholm (roughly 600 kms.); then, the final leg, a sixteen hour ferry trip between the capitals of Sweden and Estonia. I reckon that little lot should take me about five days, including ferry journey time.

Before that can happen, the Trabant will need that new engine, and I must look into the possibility of getting a GPS installed. Normally I hate GPS, with the pinging nasal American computer-voice speciously reminding you "you-space-have-space-arrived. Nonetheless, I don't fancy a journey of that magnitude without some help. Perhaps I can get a GPS with a customised Montrose accent instead. That's it, thin, eh. Aabdy happy?

Plenty of adventures to keep readers interested coming up over the next eighteen months or so, then! I'll update again before I leave for London on Thursday.

It's Ready!

2007-03-22T12:19:00.000Z

So I passed the garage on the train heading out of Montrose yesterday, and there was the "plastic dart" sat glinting in the early spring sunshine, waiting to be picked up. I am in Estonia presently, so that won't happen until early next week, when the keys will be returned to my possession in exchange for the sum of £392. Quite steep, but also quite good, when you consider that for that the garage have fixed the suspension, put in a new wheel bearing, new spark plugs, and applied a new exhaust-valance in place the rusty, unsightly, original one. With all that gubbins taken care of, the car should be back to its performance levels of early last summer, and regularly smashing the 100km/h barrier.

The Trabi has been off the road for nearly two months so it will be great to have it back again. The mechanics have already ordered extra gas masks in advance of the machine being started up again, which after such a long hiatus is likely to produce several thunderflashes worth of smoke, when it is started up. It will also be good news for this blog, which will cease to be a sorry narrative of self pitying mechanical disaster, and return back to the usual form of on-road oily-smoke adventures. Given the sheer mundanity of recent entries, it's amazing that I have any readers left. If I can pass my driving test on my return, the two-stroke heat seeking missile will be in daily use for a while down the road to Dundee. After their recent pisspoor performance with strikes, regular delays and insanely timed "engineering works", I need a holiday from Worst Group's dire stewardship of the Scotrail network.

if I pass my test and can finally drive the thing on my own, the big test will be the Scottish Trabi owners' day out in Glasgow at the end of April. That`will be the longest drive I have ever attempted, and I can tell you that I will be taking Comrade Giles' spanner, in case that bloody patched up fan makes yet another ill advised bid for freedom.

In the meantime, I have a lot of work to do over the weekend, and the small matter of the Estonia vs. Russia football match; a derby affair that seems set to make England v. Scotland look like a pre season friendly between Keith and Montrose, by comparison. Check back next week sometime. I am back on Monday, and there should be news of the latest sea trials by the middle of next week.

News

2007-03-12T14:15:00.000Z

Apologies for the lack of updates last week, but, er, there wasn't much to say.

The latest part arrived from Germany on Saturday and the mechanic seems happy with it, so hopefully we will be firing later this week. But, I'm aware that I've promised this a fair bit in my last few entries, only to be derailed by another unforeseen difficulty. So, all digits crossed, we should be back on the road by the end of the week. The garage have to fit a new rear wheel bearing which was pretty rotten, and this infernal top front kingpin joint, and then the car will get through the MOT (finally).

It's been odd not having the dart to buzz about in for the last few weeks, so it will be good to have the troublesome little arse back on the road. I'm off on my travels again soon; Brussels and Tallinn next week, then London, Brno, Berlin and Warsaw in April. So, assuming the car is fixed and I finally pass my driving test, the next major outing will be at the end of April, when I shall be off to Glasgow for some kind of Trabant-Wartburg owner's day that has been organised for down there, on the 29th.

Readers may remember the rather bizarre "Trabant's 50th birthday" celebrations that were spontaneously announced a couple of weeks back. As sagess in the Trabant club pointed out, this was in fact the birthday of the Trabant P50 (above); the iconic 601s 50th won't be until sometime in 2014. I managed to get myself doing a piece about the Trabant on Radio Belgrade. A journalist from the station read these pages and contacted me to do an interview which was good fun, as I explained to her puzzled Serb audience why I own a Trabant. She's hopefully getting a sound file of the piece to me at some point, so if it arrives, I shall link to it on here.

I hope to be back later this week with news of my Trabi being back on the road!

SORN-y story

2007-03-02T19:27:00.000Z

Aaaarghhhhh!!!!

It now seems the joint I got from Germany is the wrong one, being the kingpin joint for the bottom of the spring. The garage tell me I need the joint for the top of the spring, and they are completely different in terms of parts, so I'm back to square one.

I've been back in touch with LDM Tuning and they are looking to see if they have the necessary parts. A couple of friends from the UK Trabi club have also offered to have a look.

It is infuriating to have the car held in quarantine over such an annoyingly minor repair which I had thought would be sorted. It's at times like this when one's patience as a Trabant owner outwith the former DDR is severely tested. I now have no choice but to go through the tedious rigmarole of declaring the car officially "off the road" until its fixed. The golaposts have moved yet again, and there's not much I can do about it, but I don't want to be hassled by the DVLA into the bargain.

*Drums fingers impatiently*

So, next week then...

2007-02-23T12:09:00.000Z

Well, the latest farrago of spares arrived from Germany yesterday, in a big parcel. I took them down to the garage and after some amused banter they promised to finish up the car and get it through it's MOT, finally, sometime next week. Time is running down; the tax disc ran out at the end of January and it urgently needs replaced before I start being hassled for owning an unlicensed vehicle. In the UK, it is necessary to produce a completed MOT certificate before the car can be taxed.

The Trabant is hidden round the corner in the garage's yard and I had a look at what they had done to it so far. Seat belts are now fitted in the back and the new side indicators have been fitted in an unusual position, at either end of the front bumper. The mechanics didn't want to drill into the Duraplast wings as they feared that they would shatter, so opted for that less ruinous option instead. No two Trabis are quite the same and I haven't seen the indicators placed in this way on any other example of the car.

So, the front kingpin joint will now be fixed, a fiddly job to do properly, and the worn out rear wheel bearing replaced. I've also asked them to replace the front exhaust-cover, under the bumper; these black valance-type things often make a Trabi look really tatty, as they get coated with grime and rust quite badly. After that, a bad day for my bank manager, but a good day for me, as Trabi treks will be back in earnest after a little while off the road. Once the process is out the way, I'm going to take steps to import that new engine from Poland, and get the car re-sprayed.

It's been a high profile week for the Trabant on the news, too. Someone, somewhere, has decided that the car is fifty years old this week and there's been a blizzard of trivia and the recycling of some very old jokes in the world's media. This article in The Times serves as an excellent illustration of what a bad article a pisspoor lazy "European correspondent" can write after half an hour's Googling and the dim memory of old jokes told when the Berlin Wall fell. the article is so lame and uninformative that it could well have been written in November 1989- it adds nothing new or interesting at all to the subject. A slightly better article can be found on the BBC Europe site, which does at least attempt to understand the car's enduring popularity and place in late twentieth century European culture. There also quite a decent photo gallery of Trabi owner's cars, one of which might be familiar to regular readers of these pages.

Next update soon, when the "plastic dart" finally emerges from it's confinement in the garage.

Back from Tallinn & Broke & Other News

2007-02-13T11:36:00.000Z

And so the MOT saga rumbles on. I had hoped to be able to tell you that the Trabant was now legally taxed and back on the road, but no. After mandatory repairs and fitting of safety stuff (side indicators and rear seatbelts) it transpires that the kingpin joint on one of the front springs is knackered beyond repair and needs replacing, as is a rear nearside wheel bearing. So, another visit to LDM Tuning looms, a bill of another hundred or so euros, and God knows how much from the garage.

Aargh. By the time the car is through this and re-taxed, I'm looking at a bill of between £500 and £750 just to get it going again (that's between 750-1000 euros, or $1000-$1500). As a result, the People's Committee for Finance is up in arms and demanding stringent austerity measures, in order not to tip the Balance of Payments southwards, in the general direction of New Zealand.

Therefore, I have no alternative but to persevere with this car. I now cannot afford to buy the 1.1 Kombi to replace it, as so much of that fund has been eaten up by the 601, and its chronic kaput status in the last few months. The car will be off the road I reckon for another fortnight at this rate, by the time parts arrive from Germany and the garage has successfully fitted them. If I do end up leaving Montrose, I may just swap this car for another from the garage in Leipzig en route to Tallinn. In one more thing serious goes wrong with it, questions of the car's viability and sustainability will again arise.

I made it back from the Estonian capital after a very busy week there. I won't bore you with sundry work details, but there was an interesting footnote to the trip. An Estonian friend of mine has one of her parents' old ZAZ 968s for sale at a piddling 3000 krooni (£120), so we've shaken hands on a deal. I will acquire it the next time I'm over there (towards the end of March) and keep it in Tallinn as an Estonian runabout, when I am over there. I'm really looking forward to getting acquainted with the noisy old Soviet deathtrap, and you can be sure of hearing about future adventures with it on here.

A friend from Meanwhile at the Bar drew to my attention some monumental tokenistic arsewittery going on in Berlin this week. As this report from the London Evening Fascist has it, the Trabi is set to be banned from a planned "environmental area" in the centre of the German capital. This is a bizarre move to say the least, as:

1. Trabis (see November's posts below) release very little CO2

2. 20 mpg 4 x 4 Hummers and Jeeps don't feature on the "ban" list

3. The number of Trabis in Berlin is in very steep decline, so the impact of such a move will be negligible

4. This will effectively debar Trabant owning Germans from the centre of their own capital city.

It's a worrying political tokenism, this- an initiative that grabs headlines across the European press and gives lazy journalists some cheap laughs, whilst allowing local politicians to hone their "green" credentials- whilst achieving the square root of fuck all in environmental terms. Well done, everyone!

Finally, it's my sad duty to report that Heather and I are absolutely finished- it's all over. Time to move on then, and we won't be hearing about her on these pages again.

Kirrie blast

2007-02-05T14:03:00.000Z

Trabi looks incongruous next to modern 'cigar tubes'

And so this weekend managed about another 80 kms in the Trabant, revisiting the winding country roads from the blast with Comrade Giles two weeks ago, but this time ending up in the little market town of Kirriemuir. "Kirrie" is famous as the birthplace of J.M.Barrie (of Peter Pan fame) and as home to Kirrie Thistle juniors, but that's about it. It should also be famous for the truly excellent 88 Degrees cafe - if there's a better black coffee and carrot cake this side of Tallinn I've yet to taste it.

On the way back, we re-visited the long, long straight heading up to Little Brechin and beat the previous week's record, recording a truly staggering 112 km/h (dead on 70 mph). By the time we reached the junction and the rapid downshifting of the gears, the car was beginning to experience "re-entry" style wobbles, having built up an impressive head of steam.

All this seems a bit far off at the moment as I'm Tallinn for a dose of real winter. It was pushing minus sixteen yesterday, which is the coldest I've ever experienced, miles away from an eerily sub-tropical Angus this weekend (14 degrees in Aberdeen, more akin to April-May than the first weekend in February). This is the kind of weather where one would be grateful for an old Moskvitch or some such in the garage, as those goliaths will start up to around minus forty degrees, without hesitation.

It's great to be back here, and I really like this city. I can see myself moving out here, hopefully in the not too distant future, in which case the odyssey to end all odysseys in the Trabi would be on the cards, involving: Montrose-Rosyth; Ferry to the Hook of Holland; Hook of Holland-Rostock in the old DDR; Ferry from Rostock to Tallinn. Quite what they'd make of the "plastic dart" in this city of Audis, VWs, Beamers, Mercedes, and Jeeps is quite another matter though. I'd be able to give the trams and trolleybuses a good run for their money over distance.

I'm back on Saturday evening, and the repairs and MOT are booked for Monday morning. With that out of the way, I'm hoping for a few longer trips again as "winter" in Scotland gives way to "spring", without anyone noticing.

Right, I'm off to a pub to watch Estonia (no wins and no goals in their last four games) take on Slovenia in Ljubljana. The prognosis for the Estonians this evening is about as healthy as for a Trabant with a broken head gasket, alas.

Return to Tallinn

2007-02-02T15:24:00.000Z

Well I'm away back to Estonia for a week, taking a group of my students to the capital city, and dusting off my basic Estonian for the locals to laugh at again. I've had tonsilitis and am on antibiotics, so being the responsible group leader amidst £1.20-a-pint and £1-for-20-fags temptations will be that much easier.

Maybe there will be a burn in the Trabant again this weekend, and I'm going to have a look at that fan again. The new parts are on their way from Germany, and the MOT will happen as soon as I'm back from the Baltics. After that, I'm hoping to be able to drive the car regularly between here and my work, on a daily basis. We shall see!

There may be an update from what looks to be a snowy Tallinn during the course of next week, but, in the meantime, I shall leave you with this ZAZ commercial, which as well as giving a flavour of how stunningly abysmal Soviet television was, will give the reader a good idea of the sounds of the Estonian language.

Nagemist!!

The Best of YouTube vol. 2

2007-02-01T18:38:00.000Z

You Tube (see entries passim.) is not a bad source for Trabant related stuff, and two particular new videos have caught my eye in the last few days. This guy, a university student, starts up his yellow Trabi amidst much tapping, after three months of idlesness, in a massive pall of smoke; meanwhile this video here, which looks like a blue Trabi being driven round an abandoned military base, gives the uninitiated viewer a very good idea of what the "plastic dart" sounds like, looks like, and what it feels like to be driven in.

Of course it's not all po-faced seriousness; check out this Lithuanian psychopath rolling a ZAZ 968 and seemingly attempting to brake using his legs, all whilst accompanied by the kind of petrol station techno not heard since the heady days of Hanger 13 in Saltcoats; and another bloke deliberately crashing his ZAZ into a tree.

Enjoy!

Hiatus

2007-01-30T10:41:00.000Z

Well, the Trabant hasn't been in action since it's gasket-bursting run in the country last Sunday. The car's licence shortly runs out, and I can't really drive it again, any distance, until it has been through its MOT successfully. I'm told that one is allowed to drive on the Queen's highway if making one's way to a booked MOT. This is one of the problems of Trabi ownership. One has to wait some time for parts to turn up; Paypal payment to LDM tuning are grindingly slow, and then of course the parts have to turn up. So, the MOT is being booked tomorrow, and hopefully we will be back smoking and fully licenced in the not too distant future.

Comrade Krystof has returned from Poland with the happy news that the decent Trabant engine is mine for the princely sum of 100 zlotys (£13). It will cost more to get it over here, but still, this engine in good condition should be mine for a sum usually required to replace one windscreen wiper in a "normal" contemporary car. Krsytof and the seller got this new engine running in Poland so that he could see it in operation, and he reported with a little smile on his face that the engine "made a really good sound".

This Trabant-heart-transplant can't be long delayed, as the fan is beginning to wobble a bit again. Having driven nearly 500kms on a temporary repair, that's not too much of a surprise. Comrade Giles and I had a good look at the engine after last Sunday's fun, and the fan was moving noticeably, although not disastrously, yet. The next time it breaks (and it probably only has a couple of hundred kms left in it) will in all probability be terminal, necessitating the new motor. It's a shame, as the current engine, barring the fan problem, is in pretty good shape and I shall be putting it in a box somewhere in one of the capacious barns of the collective farm, and keeping it for spares. The flakiness of the motor is another reason to keep the Trabant under wraps for a little while, as I don't want the fan falling off on the way to the garage for the MOT.

O, and Heather and I got back together, readers, so journeys to Aberdeen, Dundee and further afield are very much back on. Our ideological differences have been resolved and she has been welcomed with open arms back onto the Montrose Committee of the Socialist Unity Party. Hoorah!

Rally-Trabi

2007-01-21T18:18:00.000Z

With Comrade Gilles in the navigator's seat, I took the Trabi today for an extended blast in the Angus countryside, putting it through its paces on backroads and farmtracks beyond Brechin; tiny hamlets such as Fern, Menmuir, etc had their tranquility shattered as the snarling and smoking dart hurtled through them at 90 km/h.

Because it is low slung and relatively light, the car handles amazingly well, especially on tricky country roads where a long straight can suddenly be punctuated by a stomach-churning series of hairpin bends. With the engine fully warmed up with a meander from Farnell to Little Brechin, fourth gear, initially reluctant to make itself available, was finally engaged and off we went, throwing the Duraplast demon about all over the place.

There were only two chewy moments; once, just beyond Menmuir, we encountered a lingering patch of ice. The car, motoring along at 70 km/h, experienced a severe loss of traction and all of a sudden was floating in the direction of a large hedge. Fortunately the ice vanished as quickly as it had appeared, and the eerie gliding drift ceased. I managed to steer in the direction of the skid and avoided the instinctive temptation to slam on the brakes, so was quite pleased, even if there was a nanosecond of extreme worry.

Vision around some of the tighter corners was also a problem. Around one 90-degree turn, we came across a Volvo, driving slowly and erratically, in the middle of the small B-road. Fortunately, there was enough time to swerve and for the mind-somewhere-else Volvo driver to get out of the way. The Swedish behemoth will always win in a head on collision with a Trabant, alas, and it really is best not to try and disprove this iron law of motoring via hands-on experiment.

Heading back towards the collective farm, we hit a very long straight- possibly an ex-military or Roman road, and the taps were opened fully. By the time we came to break sharply at a junction which appeared from virtually nowhere, the car had made it up to 105 km/h (65mph), the fastest since that legendary trip up the A90 from Dundee last summer.

I've ordered the parts from LDM tuning for the MOT re-sit which will happen soon. At any rate, it's got to happen by the end of this month, when the licence expires and the insurance terms are up for renewal. Car ownership- even one as fun as a Trabi- is a grindingly tedious pain in the arse at times like these, and expensive too. The plan for this Trabant is now as follows:

1. MOT, Tax & Insure

2. Fit New Engine. Comrade Kryzsztof has located one in excellent and hardly-used condition in Poland, and that, in time, will be the new engine for my car. our running repair to the fan is still holding up, and we've done nearly 400kms in the car since it got back on the road. However the fan is beginning to wobble again a little alarmingly- and the screws haven't loosened. This suggests that the bracket won't hold for all that much longer, and that a new engine will be necessary, with the current one held in reserve for spares.

3. Get up to 'De-Luxe' specification, and re-spray. This involves basically fitting a radio, side indicators, rear seat-belts, and looking into the possibility of a heated rear window. I have also resolved to re-spray the car. Whilst the current red-body and black roof is distinctive, it is fading rather badly. As those readers who know their colours will appreciate, red is the worst colour for fading, so I have decided to replace it with a hopefully more durable apple green with white roof scheme. The black apron around the front bumper is badly worn, too, and could do with replacing. Whilst that's off, I might as well fit some of those bike lights just above the bumper that de-luxe variants had (see picture at bottom).

Trabant

Seven Ways to Fail your MOT

2007-01-16T12:01:00.000Z

So, today was MOT day and, to no one's surprise, the Trabi flunked it.

I had thought that the rusty sill on the driver's door would have been enough to send the car's feeble hopes of passing to the bottom of the motoring oceans, but in fact the mechanic wasn't so bothered about that. He reckons there's still plenty of decent metal on the sill and that it's nothing really to worry about.

The car needs rear seat belts and side repeater indicators fitted, (how it passed previous MOTs without meeting these requirements is frankly a mystery), and it also needs repairs to the front spring and suspension joint. It's nothing disastrous, therefore; just niggling things that need fixing up. So, after finishing this entry, I'm off to LDM-Tuning to see what I can find. Overall, however, the mechanic pronounced the car "solid" which I was quite pleased with- there's nothing wrong with it beyond these workaday niggles, that can happen to any old aged four-wheeled pensioner. I'm looking at spending another £150 to put it all right and gain the cherished certificate, bringing my total spend on this troublesome little git to nearly £450. Trabis are great, but they can be a little pricey once things start going wrong. If I put in a new engine, the Blue Peter-style accumulator lurches to over £500.

Comrade Krystof has also been on the phone from Poland. He has sourced a better Trabi engine (i.e. with fan still properly attached and with much less rust) and is going to bring it back to the UK with him. I'm going to fix the 601 up with this engine, I think; it's not a massive job and will undoubtedly prolong the life of the car. He seems to have a pretty good source for Trabi engines over there so if anyone is looking for one (retail price is around £60 in Poland) let me know.

In saying all that, I really enjoyed my early morning drive today from Comrade Giles' collective farm into town. The car was totally iced up and I had to spend quite a few minutes chipping away at it. In freezing mornings, the engine takes much longer to warm up, and the gearbox is also stiff in the first couple of changes. The choke has to stay out for longer, and in consequence the car billows an embarrassing scarf of blue oily smoke for much longer than on a normal day. However, once it warmed up, the Trabi went really well, holding the road closely and sputtering along happily at 90 km/h. It's been an icy night in Angus and the frost was only just beginning to melt, as the sun came up over the town's steeple and basin. Nice.

So, more updates in the next week once the car has cleared these hurdles and has been re-taxed and insured.

Ticking Over

2007-01-10T14:41:00.000Z

Trabi for sale: make me an offer by e-mail!

Well, not a lot to report from the first week of the New Year. Since we last spoke the Trabi has sputtered its way contentedly though 150kms worth of road and the worries about something else going wrong have receded in consequence. the sagging bumper is a bad memory thanks to Krystof's professional welding job, and the fan hasn't threatened to go out on strike again, either.

As hinted at before Christmas, the Trabant (pictured) is now for sale. I am giving people who read this website and members of the UK Trabant club two weeks from today to snap it up, otherwise it will go on general sale on E-bay. Once this 601 is shifted, I will buy the 1.1 Kombi that is waiting for me to go and collect it.

More soon!

On the Road Again

2007-01-02T15:31:00.000Z

One very broken fan bracket awaits drilling

Well, the Trabi has been 'fixed' for three days now and I've done about 50kms without any significant hitch.

You'll be able to see exactly what the problem was from the photo above. With the fan bracket broken, the air-cooled engine was useless without ingenious running repairs, or indeed a new motor altogether.

The ingenuity was facilitated by a useless metal plate, that originally had been intended to weld up the collapsed bumper, but which transpired to be surplus to requirements. With the metal plate put on its side, a new hole was drilled in the bracket, to take a new bolt. A similar hole was drilled in the badly rusted fan housing (below).

Engine Fan Unit awaits cleaning (that white stuff is rust in the process of formation)

With that ghastly white oxidisation on both components scraped away with a screwdriver, Comrade Giles and I managed to get the fan, with much twiddling of the annoying fan belt, back into place. The broken bracket was glued up with reputedly super-strength glue which turned out to be pisspoor in practice; it held for only around ten minutes. This didn't matter, thankfully. A keep bolt was ratched on (the engine vibrates so much that no keepbolt= no fan after about 1km) and tightened up, and the moment of truth arrived.

New hole drilled (the glue didn't last very long though; the broken bit fell off shortly after this photo was taken)

The most amazing thing was that the car started at the first turn of the key, after nearly a full month off the road. I was really nervous to begin with, but the car seems more or less back to normal after a very bleak couple of broken-down months.

Fixed: Improvised Bumper Plate Gets the "Plastic Dart" Smoking Again!

Thanks once again to Comrade Giles for giving up another Saturday morning; and to "Riccall Jim", who suggested this idea for a fix a while back. In his words, "It's Not Pretty, But It Works!"

Sea Trials

Just until this fix beds in, I'm keeping the Trabi as a local satellite, confining it to the St. Cyrus-Craigo-Montrose triangle. I've been out in it every day since Saturday, driving a few kilometres at a time. The most spectacular experience was on Hogmanay ("New Year's Eve" to those outside of Scotland) when Montrose was visited by a colossal combined thunder-and-hailstorm. Waiting in the supermarket car park, the clouds over the Basin went black; massive Caribbean-style forks of lighting jagged around the gloomy skies, turning them a deep lilac with each flash. Hailstones the size of monkey nuts appeared from nowhere and skittled off the windscreen with a horrid crack, like the breaking of a cockroach's carapace. The storm was incredibly intense for about five minutes, to the extent that I thought that the glass was going to break. By the time I was back on the road, the hail had given way to heavy rain, and massive puddles of standing water in the middle of the road between Montrose and St. Cyrus. Keeping in third, and staying at 60 km/h, the newly fixed dart forded these nasty obstacles impressively.

In other drives I've managed to reach 90 km/h (56 mph) without much difficulty and all the hills of horror that broke the old clutch can now be taken normally. I'm really enjoying being at the helm of the Duraplast destroyer once again; I'd begun to get used to not driving it, and it's like finding an old, trucculent, unreliable but endearing friend again.

The "Plastic Dart" Rides Again!

2006-12-30T16:11:00.000Z

Well, on one of the last days of the old year, something happened which frankly I thought wouldn't happen again; the Trabant got back on the road.

Comrade Giles and I headed out to the farm this morning, bearing with us a tube of "Loctite Epoxy" and not very much hope. Over Christmas, I had spoken to my Dad about the problem, and his not very helpful reply was "Why does the phrase 'breaking for spares' keep popping into my head?"

I shall provide a fuller account in the New Year, with photos, but suffice it to say that, with a drill, some new screws, and a careful manipulation of the fan belt, the car was pieced together. I took about an hour, and the cold weather meant that the glue was useless anyway. (The back of the glue packet listed about 785 conditions which all had to be in place before the glue would actually work...no colder than ten degrees...you have to be able to eat your dinner off the surfaces you're glueing together...a friendly passing elephant has to hold the glued parts together with his trunk before a bond will form...etc etc) The glue was, in short, a waste of time, fortunately there was enough good metal on the broken fan bracket for a new hold to be drilled and a new screw applied.

It's been nearly a month since the car was abandoned on Giles' farm in a state of near-total despair. If this repair had failed, a new engine would have been required, as the bloody fan bracket is an integral part of the crank case and cannot be bought separately. Nor can it be welded owing to the cheap aliminium alloy it's made from. So, failure here, and the car would have been shifted to anyone willing to take it on and spend 650 euros on a reconditioned engine from LDM tuning.

A month without the key being turned usually equals a battery flatter than the Fens but, amazingly, the car sputtered into life immediately. No red light. No undue noise. The fan showed no sign of catapaulting itself in the direction of Brechin. Gently, the bonnet was closed, and Giles clambered in, with us about thirty seconds away from death by cartbon monoxide poisoning (there was quite a bit of smoke, needless to say.) And off we went....and went....and went. The car made it all the way back to Montrose, about eight miles away, without any hitches whatsoever. On a flat straight bit by the otherwise twisty back road by Montrose basin, it growled its way up to 90 km/h without any difficulty, with a bit more left in reserve. Giles' expert securing of the fan had given the Trabi another dart at the life it seemed to have given up on a month ago.

Hurrah and huzzah! This unexpectedly successful repair means that an otherwise quiet New Year will be that bit more enjoyable. The sputtering smoky catastrophe is still not out the woods; the MOT is due at the end of January but, if it gets through that okay, then it can be shifted on with a bit more confidence. The 1.1 Kombi is still very much in my sights come the spring.

A very Happy New Year to all readers, when it comes. Next update (with pictures of the repair, etc.) will be in the middle of next week, sometime.

It's Christmas time, then....

2006-12-19T14:20:00.000Z

And so that time of year where everything stops dead for a few days is upon us. Things are grinding to a halt at work, like a Trabant gasping the last drops of two stroke from an empty tank. My office is like the Marie Celeste and I'm going to throw myself overboard, into the Yuletide Ocean, in a minute or two.

The 601 still isn't fixed, co-ordinating a time where Comrade Gilles and myself aren't busy on the collective farm/ marking coursework from the compulsory Marxism-Leninism Module 1: the Historical Imperative at the people's university is proving difficult. As the mechanically minded Comrade Kryzstof is on a fraternal delegation in Poland, motivation has been in short supply, too. It is absolutely Freezing up here at the moment; frost lies thick on the pavement, even at lunchtime. having sat in this weather for a fortnight without turning a wheel, I can see the Trabant struggling to find the motivation to start, too, when the key is eventually turned.

Indeed thoughts have been turning to the 1.1 to be purchased in the new year, and there seem to be a growing number of devotees to these late model Trabis on the net (see the "Trabi links" section to the right). I'm looking forward to getting back to regular motoring in the New Year, and passing on the dear old 601 to the Trabant Doctor it so urgently needs.

Happy Christmas to all loyal readers of this blog; I should be back just before the new year with an update.

East German "Melkus" re-born!

2006-12-14T13:08:00.000Z

The Independent newspaper last Saturday carried a lengthy article on the re-appearance of the Melkus sports car brand, in Dresden. A gleaming, new-built, lemon-yellow Melkus RS1000 was unveiled at a motor show in the city and has attracted a great deal of interest from Ostalgiacs and car fans alike.

Melkus, established by former DDR racing driver Heinz Melkus, who died last year, was a small car concern that received permission to build some prototypes in 1968-69. The car, in classic DDR style, was gradually built up by Melkus himself scouring used car yards and factories for suitable components. When the finished product emerged in the 1970s, the Soviet bloc press were quickly frothing at the mouth at this frisson of state-sanctioned decadence.

During this decade, 101 of the very rare Melkus RS1000 were made, with much of the mechanics still based on Wartburg-Trabant two stroke technology. Most Melkus were fitted with the Wartburg's 992cc 3 cylinder engine, although a few had a bigger 1.2 litre engine for racing purposes. The last one appeared in 1981, before the firm closed.

The re-formed company, owned by the Melkus family who have survived since unification by running a BMW dealership, has committed to building 15 new RS1000 machines by the middle of next year, all of which already have new owners. After that, development and testing of a new RS2000 sports car will occupy the re-emerged concern. With development scheduled to be finished in 2008, they plan on building only around 25 a year, one of which will set you back about 75000 euros. It looks well worth it, based on the computer mock up of the new racer below:

The original sports car went like a rocket, with even those based on the distinctly underwhelming Wartburg engine managing 100 mph. The new RS2000 is going to be based closely on the original late 60s design, with an estimated top speed of around 150 mph. Good luck to the Melkus people with their new car. All we need now are modernised Trabis and Wartburgs made by someone else....

You can read the Indescribably Boring's original article here.

Book Review: Simon Burnett Ghoststrasse : Germany's East Trapped between Past and Present

2006-12-14T10:26:00.000Z

Black Rose Books, Montreal & London, £14.95

Simon Burnett's Ghost Strasse is a timely book for all those students of the DDR who have had their fill of academic treatises on the nature of politics and everday life in the country, and endless information on the events of October-November 1989. Drawing on an almost unrivalled network of contacts, and on insight garnered from many years journalistic experience of studying and writing about East Germany, Burnett's account goes some way towards answering the question, "...but what happened in Germany after October 1990?

The figures are stark. East Germany is trapped between a propserous western Europe, and the new EU states to the East, where labour costs are that much cheaper. In part, then, this accounts for GDP in the former DDR standing at just 70% of the German average, with unemployment rising towards 20%, making it one of the poorest regions of Europe. A perceived lack of infrastructure and meaningful job opportunites, as Burnett shows us, has contributed to a drain of the young and talented from the East, to the West; a population movement not reversed since the fall of the Berlin wall. In consequence, many peripheral areas in the former DDR, towns such as Frankfurt-an-der-Oder, are literally dying on their feet.

Burnett ably navigates his way through the complicated political and financial processes involved in the unification of the country from 1990 onwards. He castigates Helmut Kohl in particular for a borderline-criminal under-estimation of the problems that unification would bring, compounding this political ineptitude with flowery blue skies rhetoric, that unreasonably raised the hopes of former DDR citizens for a better life. The resignation of the head of the German central bank, in disgust at Kohl's insistence on an exchange rate of one DM for one Ostmark in 1990, is covered in interesting detail. Suffice it to say that, had the banker's advice been followed, East Germany would be in a better economic position today.

Not that the author has any time for the former ruling Communists. He is particularly disparaging about the PDS/Links Partei, which has at its core many unrepentant former SED-apparatchiks. Burnett is savage on the 'quality' of the PDS' political leadership and on the apparent amnesia of its older members; Stasi generals, stool pigeons, former party functionaries and co. who have re-invented themselves as "only wanting the best" during the DDR's existence, and who have apparently completely forgotten the existence of arbitary arrest, torture, state sanctioned murder, blackmail and extortion practiced in the secret service's many grim prisons. The present day PDS, in the grip of a younger generation of neo- Stalinist hardliners, according to Burnett, stands little chance of being much other than a regionally based party of protest- unless the programme of a reformist minority is embraced. Burnett, estimating that there are still around 75,000 hardline Communists in the former East Germany" shows us that there is little chance of this happening in the near future. He also uncovers the frightening popularity of neo-Nazi parties in the former DDR, and the worrying apathy of the German police and courts to deal with their crimes- assault, murder, arson- in anything like a proportionate manner.

The book is at its strongest when discussing two matters; the corruption endemic in the "workers' and farmers' state", and the tragic fate of former dissidents in the new Germany. Chapters are devoted to the shadowy career of one Alexander Schalck-Golodowski, who in Communist times ran a semi-legal export agency to raise Western currency for a cash-poor government. This trade included the sale of political prisoners to West Germany in exchange for money; a secret policy estimated to have cost the West German government 3.4 billion Deutschmarks between 1961-89; in addition to Schalck-Golodowski's sale of arms to pariah regimes all over the world, and his purchase of Western consumer goods, food and drink, and pornography, for the SED leadership's secret compund at Wandlitz. The fate of Schalck's massive slush fund, we learn, is very murky indeed, following unification. Burnett reveals that only two people had unlimited access to Honecker in the 1970s and 1980s; Stasi boss Erich Mielke, and Schalck-Golodowski. Effectively, the boss of the top-secret KoKo trading organisation was no. 3 in the DDR nomenklatura, although no East German citizen actually knew that.

Burnett mixes such complicated political narrative with tragic personal stories. We learn of Walter and Lotte Ulbricht's adopted daughter, Beate, who became estranged from her parents in her teens and died a penniless alcoholic in a squalid East Berlin flat in the 1990s. Through Beate's sad life, we learn of the difficulties of being the child of ruthlessly ambitious, powerful parents in a dictatorship, and of the callous heartlessness of her mother. We learn that former dissidents are in little better state; no one cares in the new Germany about their past, and doctors regard them typically as mentally disturbed, or a nuisance. Whilst these people are the subject of general indifference, their former Stasi persecutors live out a comfortable retirement on a full state pension.

But for all its strengths this is a flawed book. It is very, very badly edited. One minute we are at Lotte Ulbricht's funeral in 2002, with Egon Krenz delivering a weasel-worded self-justifying eulogy; the next, we are back in the DDR in the early 1950s. The book jumps around sometimes seemingly at random, and would have made much greater impact had it been properly organised. Burnett is also an irritating moraliser at several times in the narrative.

He doesn't seem to like anyone; West German politicians; East German politicians; Wessis with their presumed resentment toward the East; German citizens who grew up in the DDR, still expecting the state to solve all their problems; Ostalgie; those who have 'made good' in the newly unified state; all of them are blasted with both of Burnett's barrels at some stage. He has the tabloid journalist's contempt for intellectuals, and for people who might have a slightly unconventional view of the world, evidenced in his interview with fomer DDR-dissident turned PDS-election candiate, Florian Havermann. "...an intellectual who revelled in explaining the inexplicable. if he insisted on circling the clouds, I knew I would never catch him...Frau Havermann ushered me into a second floor room, where I sat alone, waiting for the haughty academic with his firewall of lofty language." (p. 75) If Burnett was that dubious, one wonders why he bothered conducting an interview, as clearly he has already made up our minds for us.

There's plenty to interest the reader in this book. Burnett's merging of personal narrative against a backdrop of familiar and not so familiar political events is deft, but the impact is lost in the book's shambolic, badly edited structure. His critique of the lingering extremism prevalent in German politics is undountedly based on fact, but his insistent unsolicited moralising, and inability to control his own irritation at some of the individuals involved, blunts the force of his reasoning. His treatment of the Ostalgie phenomenon, such a controversial current in German politics and culture in the last fifteen years, is scant. Finally, a book which spends so long chronicling the failures and missed opportunities of fifteen years of German unification should perhaps attempt some kind of outline solution to these problems, but Burnett declines to do so. It is for that reason, as much as any other, that Ghost Strasse stands as a frustratingly missed opportunity.

On the Old, and On a New Trabant

2006-12-12T16:12:00.000Z

Well, I still haven't found the time to set about the crippled dart with a drill and the araldite. It's been a really busy couple of weeks at work and there's been loads of other offline matters to attend to, but hopefully things will be resolved satisfactorily later this week.

I've also taken the painful decision to sell this Trabant on. It still potentially could be an exhibition-standard example of the car, if someone with garage space, two stroke mechanical skills and a months' worth of spare time to lavish upon it. It doesn't need all that much done to it, provided I can get it through its MOT in January, to make it into an enjoyable and reliable local runabout / weekend car again. It still only has 83500 kms on the clock, which is nothing for a car that is now 17. However, the little git has been off the road for two months, and I simply don't have the mechanical knowledge necessary to fix it without bothering half a dozen other people for advice. With my paying out of a truly astronomical insurance bill every month, it simply doesn't make sense to keep it anymore, which is sad, as I've had great fun in it.

Readers currently with their hearts in their mouths can be reassured however- I've already taken steps to ensure the continuation of my Trabant owning career and, with it, the existence of this incidental droplet in the cyber oceans. As indicated earlier this year, I have successfully located a very good Trabant 1.1 Kombi (like the one in the picture above) and have agreed a price for its purchase, after my current "plastic dart" has moved on. The 1.1 is powered by a licence built VW Polo engine, so if it goes kaput I can simply bother the local garage to fix it properly. At the moment, that is not possible with the 601.

So, if any readers fancy taking on the current Trabi 601 I can supply them with details and an outline price by e-mail. It'd be nice to think that the current car would go to someone appreciative of these strange little machines, and who can look after it properly. One couldn't ask for a fuller service history than the one contained in these pages....next year's blog entries will deal with the new 1.1 in all its gleaming white Duraplast glory.

I should update next on Friday with an araldite related account, and a review of the Simon Burnett book, now finished, mentioned in my last scribblings below.

Araldite Patch Up

2006-12-02T15:32:00.000Z

Well, it seems the solution to the latest problem is in a humble tube of glue, capable of welding careless fingers together, and inducing a visit to A&E, within seven seconds.

The broken fan bracket is made out of some kind of alloy which cannot be welded together, so that's out of the question. Thanks to my correspondent Jim, a new solution has been found. Apparently two holes need to be drilled in the fragemnt of bracket that remains, with the sheared fan housing attached by means of a steel thread, and secured by Araldite. Jim suggests that "it's not pretty, but it works." Here's hoping....Comrade Krystof is likely to attempt this proceedure before he returns to Poland next weekend. As soon as I know the result, I shall tell you about it on here. Hopefully after that, the Trabant will start behaving itself again. I'd like this blog to return to its normal mix of descriptions of adventures on the road, and East German history, rather than turning into a sorry self pitying catalogue of mechanical disaster.

On the subject of East German culture and history, two new things to report this week. On the recommendation of the Trabi Owners' Club magazine, Knight Rider, I manage to get a copy of the republikflucht Disney film called Night Crossing, made in 1981. This is a truly bizarre movie; if you can imagine The Waltons trying to escape the DDR, you'll have some idea of what it's like. Based on the true story of two families who flew over the Iron Curtain in a home-made hot-air balloon, this movie turns a truly breathtaking and courageous escape into a risible, caricatured farce. It is interesting as a piece of blatant Cold War propaganda. However, despite the presence of some decent actors (John Hurt and Ian Bannen amongst them), the protagonists, from the escape-hungry Hurt to the sinister Stasi men trying to prevent the two families' departure, are so wooden and stereotypical that one doesn't really care whether they manage to escape or not, by the end. I saw this movie as a child and really liked it; however, it is likely to try the patience of anyone over the age of about twelve, these days.

For old car fans, there are plenty of decent sightings which make the wafer-thin plot and cardboard-cut out characters just about bearable. My personal favourite was a wonderful blue and white Wartburg 311- the foreunner of the 1970s "Knight". It was a truly incongruous sight; the elegant appearance, and beautiful design, of a Borgward Isabella, yet the sound and smoke emission of a hard-pressed petrol lawnmower. As Hurt and his family head towards their launch point with the balloon in a trailer, their car emits so much blue smoke as to obscure the lines of it's trailer in a dense cloud of emissions. I'd love to get my hands on a 311, but they're disappearing fast, and, from a brief trawl on the net, spares seem increasingly hard to come by for these 1950s cars. There was one on E-Bay UK a while back, but I think that had been sat in a garage for years and needed a lot of work doing to it.

I've also begun a newly published history of East Germany which has proved pretty gripping so far: Simon Burnett's Ghost Strasse: Germany's East between Past and Present. The book deals with the individual stories of people who were prominent either in the DDR state apparatus, or who dissented from it, and touches on the controversies surrounding Ostalgie and the pretty rotten treatment that former dissidents have had in a newly unified Germany. Difficult and painful subjects such as the economic stagnation of East Germany under capitalism, and the frightening resurgence of neo-Nazi political movements, are also discussed in detail. Suffice it to say that Burnett's tome has stalled my previously relentless progress with the new Rebus novel, The Naming of the Dead. Given that I look forward to new Rebus books as keenly as I anticipate my Trabi being fixed, that is praise indeed for Burnett's efforts. I shall stick up a full review soon, but in the meantime, I recommend it very highly.

More soon!

Fannying About

2006-11-27T12:35:00.000Z

Well, the clutch is fixed, and the gears work again, and the car goes up hills without any problem, but, guess what....it's bust again.

The clutch was finally fixed and the engine connected up again after a further three hours work, which also involved cleaning up fairly horrendous oil caking at the back of the engine, replacing the close-to-snapped fan-belt and brushing away some pretty bad rust. The bumper was also welded up and the baggage strap and mud-caked Tesco bags, there for two months, were consigned to the bin. Krystof said that the car would be okay, but that, if I had the time and skills, I should strip it down and start from the beginning again. Failing that, I should sell this Trabant and get another, having left it in the hands of a capable enthusiast.

With the car put back together, it was time for its sea-trials; some gentle manoeuvres, up a hill, trying to engage fourth gear with a very cold engine: all was going swimmingly. Krystof's expert mechanics had made the engine run much more smoothly and the Trabi, which had sounded increasingly like a snarling rally car before the clutch went, was much, much quieter. I was highly delighted that the car was going so well again, after a month or so of increasingly poor performance.

I was heading back to the farm when the red light suddenly came on on the speedo. Uh-oh. The car wasn't performing badly, and I was mystified as to the reason for the red light. I looked in the rear view mirror. Clouds and clouds of clear white smoke were coming from the exhaust, and steam began to rise from under the engine. About 200 yards from the repair shed, I cut the engine immediately and brought the car to an alarmed halt.

The cause was one of the many, many, minor niggles identified by Krystof, as he repaired the clutch. The ventilating fan had sheared off its bracket, and lay uselessly in the newly welded bumper-well, causing the engine to overheat. The bracket that holds the fan in place had been cracked for a long time-the bearing's crack was oxidised and rusted-and had just about held up under the slackness of the old fan belt; the newly tense component destroyed it completely. With steam still rising from the engine, the car was pushed to one side, knackered yet again, out of commission for another indefinite period, having lasted all of three kilometres.

Had a kindly explosives expert suddenly appeared at that moment, with a couple of hundred grammes of Semtex and an expressed desire to blow up a Trabant, I'd probably just have let him do it. I was so angry and frustrated. So, another two weeks off the road until a part comes from Germany; another day puzzling out how to fit it; another two weeks without a car. That after being off the road for over a month.

One more incident like this and that's it for this car. I shall keep you posted.... (this article, written in haste, will be updated later in the week...)

In the clutch of the Clutch.....

2006-11-20T11:47:00.000Z

And so, finally, after delays and the usual neurotic combination of worry and apathy that accompanies any major repair, the hapless Trabi was towed out yesterday to my friend Gilles' farm, where, in a large shed with arc lamps and a lot of tools, the repair of my hirpling East German motor began in earnest.

Being towed is a very strange experience. The car jerks a good deal and one has to focus on the rear bumper of the towing vehicle (a Land Rover, which meandered along the country roads at up to 70 km/h without seeming to notice any difference) and ensuring the tow rope doesn't go slack. It's also quite weird travelling at high speeds with the engine off. The jerking movements when moving off from a standstill, are similar to those in dodgems, except of course the aim of the game is the diametric opposite ( don't bump into anything).

Engine being taken apart

The first thing was to pull the engine out which, to the mechanically illiterate, seems a job of truly Herculean proportions. The front "radiator" grille came off easily, and then the battery and other assorted wires had to be disconnected. A colossal sneeze sent the air cooling system flying off its fitting (they are no more securely fitted to the engine than an extension is to the end of a hairdryer.) The first real obstacle was undoing some very rusted bolts which were holding the engine in place. Some of these were stuck absolutely fast, and indeed the motor had the general appearance of the engine room of a decommissioned destroyer- much rust, dust, toxic stuff, and very stubborn fittings. One bolt had to be dislodged by sawing it in half with a hacksaw blade- it simply would not move otherwise.

Comrades Krystof and Gilles hack away at a rusted bolt

With such tiresome obstacles out of the way, the engine, with much wiggling and careful pulling finally came free. Krystof, the Polish mechanic who is working on the car, contemplated its gunky entrails gloomily. Apparently, there's a fair bit of rust on some parts of the engine, and it's back end (the bit that sits next to the fuel tank) is coated in thick layers of black gunk, rather like an Icelandic cliff covered in guillemot droppings. There's an unexplained petrol leak from somewhere in the engine and he reckons that it's not been using fuel properly, or that a little part has rusted through and will need replaced. The fan belt was stretched tauter than a neurotic ballerina's nerves on opening night, and is on the point of snapping, so a new one will need to be procured whilst the engine is out. He also wants to clean the engine thoroughly and make sure everything else is okay, as this will get the car moving along better and prolong its life.

And so, to the clutch. On opening up the bellhousing, there was a big cry of "whoooooaaah!!!!", and the comrades of the Trabant repair collective scattered in all directions; a choking cloud of graphite dust from the fried clutch rose from the engine, like a gigantic swarm of fruitflies from a pyramid of decomposing summer raspberries. God knows what was in that stuff, but we weren't breathing it in! Krystof intends to keep my worn out clutch as a souvenir, as he says that in all his years of working with cars and lorries, that is the most worn part he has ever seen. The fossilised component left two ghostly rings of graphite dust on the garage floor, where it had lain (see below)- the bearings were worn right down to the metal, with every last shaving of friction-absorbing graphite used up. It is frankly amazing that it lasted as long as it did.

That was the clutch that was!

The new clutch was easily fitted, and is ready to go back in. However, the Trabant faces another week off the road whilst these other niggling tasks are seen to, and the engine is cleaned (and hopefully that petrol leak, wherever it's coming from, is fixed.)

Thanks very much to comrades Krystof, Gilles, Matt and Fiona for their help yesterday, and also to everyone on here, and on the Wartburg-Trabant messageboard for their help and advice. Hopefully, next week, we will all be able to enjoy a small share in a new found Trabant propserity. By next week, if everything goes to plan, the Trabi will ride again, with a new clutch, a properly welded bumper, and the radio fitted and playing the latest propaganda and military marching tunes broadcast on Radio Karl-Marx-Stadt.

Various Things....

2006-11-13T15:44:00.000Z

There's been some interesting responses to my discussion of the Stern report last week (see turgid verbiage below). One or two people have commented that I really should give the car up if it's as polluting as all that. Hmmn, I can kind of see an argument there, but for me it misses the whole point rather; I've driven only around 5,000 kms (3,125 miles) in my Trabant in nearly a year, which is far less CO2 than most "normal" cars with a normal performance doing a normal mileage. The point being that the hundred or so Trabant owners giving up their cars in the UK will matter nary a jot in polar icecap melting terms- especially when those ghastly cold sores on the face of Scotland, Longannet Power Station and Grangemouth, produce billions of tonnes of CO2 each year.

I think the point of the Stern report is that people should be encouraged to take responsibility for their actions in the round; sure, I drive a car whose emissions aren't ideal, but then I recycle about 60% of my domestic waste, don't use the central heating pointlessly, use efficient light bulbs in my house, and don't charter a helicopter when I want to go to Arbroath for the day. Nor do I have a dozen weekends in "Easyjet" locations per year. So whilst not blameless (who is) in pollution terms I try to offset the dart's miserable hydrocarbon incontinence in other ways.

In any case, some of my pessimism about the car's CO2 emissions seem to be misplaced. I'm told that what fuel is burnt, is burnt very efficiently by the Trabi, and that CO2 emissions are negligible. This means that the car contributes very little in global warming terms. However- the problem- and the pollution- comes from the two stroke engine's catastrophic fuel inefficiency. The engine spits out around 30% of the fuel charge unburnt which is stunningly profligate; for every £20 spent filling up the tank, £7 might as well be set on fire - a safe distance from the filling station, naturally. Current government targets for new build cars are set at 0.1% fuel wastage- so, whilst the Trabant isn't melting the polar icecaps, as some would have you believe, the outdated two stroke technology is poisonous (Wartburg + Trabant fumes + brown coal smoke + enivronmental illiteracy = a very unhealthy and polluted DDR), and chronically wastes natural resources.

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Many apologies to the readers who have left comments in the life of this blog, only to meet with a seeming stony indifference from my end. I've just changed over to the new Blogger Beta platform and to my horror was confronted with 32 "unmoderated" comments. These can now be seen in all their glory and the new blogging platform will make it easier for these to appear almost instantaneously in the future. A hello to prolific scribes such as the "Romerican" (a link to his very decent blog has now been added to the right--->), the Edge, Filthy, Simon, Maalie & Carwyn. Thanks also to TRABANTMAN for his very robustly expressed clutch advice!

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Speaking of the clutch, it's finally turned up from East Germany, so I am now attempting to book a date to have that fixed in the nearest of futures. It's apparently not a hard job...fingers crossed. I had no idea what a clutch looked like, but, in the Trabant's case, it seems to be two large graphite and steel circles, which are quite heavy; I must have been the subject of colourful early morning curses from the postman. I have a strong feeling that pushing the car up those steep hills in Aberdeen and on the brutal incline after the little bridge on the Aberdeenshire-Angus borders, has had the same effect as a heavy science textbook on a student's lunchtime snack of gingernut biscuits; i.e, crumbled it to rusty atoms. More news on that soon.

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Historians of the DDR and Ostalgiacs will have noticed the passing, last week, of the notorious Markus Wolf, former head of the Stasi's foreign intelligence agency. Wolf was so effective at his very difficult job, that no one in Western intelligence knew what he looked like until 1978; by then, he was only eight years away from retirement. Wolf's agents caused the fall of the popular West German chancellor Willi Brandt, and, in less high profile ways, caused much intelligence to flow from West to East. A former Foreign Office wallah was on Radio 4's Today programme last Friday to comment on Wolf's passing; he stated, sniffily, that whilst he had no personal respect for Wolf or his ideology (the spymaster remained an unrepentant Marxist-Leninist to his death), one could admire his achievements in his field.

Wolf was certainly from a fascinating generation; that small group of German Communists who fled to Russia, after the progress of Adolf Hitler to absolute power during 1933-34 became irreversible. Intense schooling at various schools and institutes in the USSR followed, with varying results; Wolf learnt much about espionage, propaganda and aircraft design. This group of German emigres was to form the core of the DDR leadership following the state's foundation in October 1949.

What is astonishing is the casual way in which this group of people saw murder as a justified political strategy. The first Staatsratsvorstizender, Walter Ulbricht, portrayed in DDR propaganda as a kindly uncle-figure, in fact spent much of the 1930s bumping off rivals to his hoped-for leadership role in a future Communist Germany. According to Lavrenty Pavlovich Beria, the ghastly head of Stalin's NKVD responsible for the deaths of millions in the great purges of the 1930s, Ulbricht was the stupidest individual he had ever met- this after he witnessed a dismal speech by the future DDR premier, to German POWs, after the Soviet victory at the Battle of Stalingrad, in early 1943.

The regime found it hard to change its habits after Brezhnev tired of Ulbricht's Stalinist intransigence, and gave his blessing to Erich Honecker's successful assumption of power in 1971. Honecker, whose championing of "consumer socialism" was popular for a period in the 1970s, nevertheless held to political murder as a legitimate tactic- notoriously putting together a Stasi assassination squad to take out prominent DDR dissidents in the West, a foul scheme in which Wolf was implicated. To say nothing of the lives that the Stasi ruined within the DDR, or the 192 people killed at Honecker's "anti-fascist peace wall" from 1961-89.

At face value, the DDR state had some noble aims; subsidised housing, free healthcare, free education, the right of every person to progress according to ability, rather than social background or gender. In reality, the murderous, callous and inhumane CVs of individuals such as Honecker and Wolf tell us, ultimately, of its illegitimate foundations and inevitable failure. This mitigates against too much retrospective admiration for the DDR's particular brand of Marxism-Leninism, as the country's main figures, one by one, follow their State into the pages of history.

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To end on a slightly less gloomy note, I've noted with great delight the fortunes of my German football team, Hansa Rostock, this season. Having pumped the dismal Eintracht Brauschweig 4-0 at the Ostsee Stadion this weekend, Hansa are now second only on goal difference in the Bundesliga's second division and it's looking good for a return to the top flight for the first time in three seasons, with the side currently seven points clear of the third place team. Hansa, of course, were the last champions of the DDR Oberliga before reunification, and have done as well as any of the DDR sides since 1991- certainly outperforming illustrious old names such as Dynamo Dresden, Lokomotive Leipzig and the Stasi's team of artifically favoured cheats, Dynamo Berlin. All these bigger names now exist as veritable footballing plankton much further down the German league ladder , with perhaps only Energie Cottbus, currently in the Bundesliga proper, outperforming them. Long may it continue!

A Stern future for the Trabant?

2006-11-07T15:09:00.000Z

Things have been a bit quiet on this here site as the "plastic dart" is still off the road awaiting its new clutch, which has yet to arrive from Germany. All I've been able to do is run the engine a few times, to ensure that the battery doesn't go completely flat. So, no new adventures to report, which is most irritating, but there we have it.

However, things haven't been all the quiet elsewhere- particularly with the publication last week of Sir Nicholas Stern's Economic Review of Climate Change, seen in digestible shorter version here. The report has produced a veritable Dionysian orgy of middle class liberal handwringing, on Radio 4 and in the newly restyled tabloid-former-broadsheets, about the looming destruction facing the planet, without radical action being taken. None other than Bamber "University Challenge" Gascoigne recently encouraged us all to go and buy an electric G-Wiz car to save the planet, as though we all had the necessary seven grand just waiting in a sock drawer for the purpose.

The report states fairly bluntly that, without massive lifestyle changes and relentless pursuit of carbon-alternative technologies, then, frankly, we've (all of us) had it, in economic terms, to say nothing of what might happen culturally, socially and geographically. Of course, in High Politics, the interest of big business and the economy comes first before the individual; in part, then the report reads as apocalyptic and terrifying predicition, in part a pretty grubby "how can we make money out of this climate change, then?"

It's not my intention to indulge in lackwitted bar stool politics on here- I'll leave that to the likes of Richard Littlejohn and other right wing pundits who'd prefer to pretend that climate change is still the eccentric and arcane preserve of a few otherwise obscure boffins. Climate change is happening faster and quicker than anyone realised previously- if you encounter someone who seriously contends otherwise, best dismiss them as the batshit lunatics that they are, rather than waste further futile time trying to remove their blinkers.

What implications does such a review- likely to shape government thinking on climate change for sometime to come- on an individual owning an old fashioned and reputedly heavily polluting car?

The Trabant was conceived by Communist planners at a time when it was generally assumed that a natural resource such as oil was limitless, and there was only a dim understanding of the polluting properties of the resource. All of a sudden, nearly half a century on, the two stroke motor looks very expensive both in terms of its petrol consumption, and the noxious toxins it belches into the atmosphere. All new cars now have their CO2 emission figures listed as a matter of routine, and the emissions test is a key part of a revamped MOT. The car is subject to acientific test by the garage, and now has to pass a "visual smoke test" as well, so my Trabi is going for a long run on the motorway before I take it to the garage in January.

Despite looking extensively for Trabant CO2 emission figures on the net, they don't seem to exist, but there is little reason to suspect that they will be anything other than horrifically embarrassing. That said, a poster on the UK Wartburg-Trabant club Yahoo Group has had his two stroke and rather thirsty Wartburg 353 repeatedly tested for carbon emissions, with the repeated result that the Wart is "carbon-neutral". It really is hard to believe that this is the case, but the absence of figures is rather puzzling.

There are a number of possibilities for legislation affecting Trabant owners in the next few years as a result of the general direction of the report's findings;

1. The Government bans Two-Stroke Engines Marine two stroke engines have already been banned for a year now on the basis of pollution, so it's not inconceivable that this may happen. This would be the ultimate disaster for Trabant owners, as, overnight, the car would be turned into unusable junk (I'll leave readers to complete the obvious cheap joke here themselves). The general drift of legislation is heading in a more prescriptive approach to "old" technology, with the Hungarian government offering thirty thousand florints worth of free public transport tickets in return for the scrapping of a Trabant. 10,000 older Hungarian Trabants have bitten the dust as a result of this policy.

The EU is also much exercised in getting "old technology" off the roads in other eastern European countries. The key difference is that other Europeans actually invest in their public transport, whereas the UK's current pisspoor shower of politicians seem determined not to invest in it at all (we'd have to put up taxes, y'see). In this case, the only European countries in ten years time where one could drive a Duraplast bullet unmolested, would be Belarus, Georgia and Moldova. I must look into seeing how much is it to rent a flat in Tblisi.....

2. The Government tinkers with the MOT further, removing the Trabant's exemption from emissions testing which would have the same effect as 1., i.e. ensuring that all Trabants are deemed unroadworthy on the basis of pollution, and scrapped.

3. The Government Introduces Restrictions on certain types of car stating that licences for two stroke cars will only be granted for 1500 miles' worth of journeys per year- allowing the owner to take it to motor shows and, er, that's it. This type of restriction would obviate a few awkward local paper headlines along the lines of TRABANT LIBERTARIAN SAYS: I'LL GO TO PRISON RATHER THAN GIVE UP MY EAST GERMAN CHARIOT for the government, but is pretty much unenforceable at the present time- though maybe not a few years in the future, when road pricing, on the basis of CCTV cameras and licence plate recognition, is introduced nationwide.

4. Trabant Owners have to pay through the nose in newly altered road tax i.e, we pay the same licence as SUV owners pay (currently £210 but set to rise steeply in successive budgets). I'd find it personally very embarrassing to be in the same bracket as the Jeremy Clarksons and Humvee driving cod-military fantasists of this world- voluntary new Hummer purchasers should be subject to the little known burnt at the stake tax, without exception. If I had to, though, I'd pay without complaining.

5. Trabant owners have to set aside large sums to compete in the carbon trading market The era of carbon trading is upon us already, although the concept has yet to develop a wider currency. Basically, it means that, if you do too much of one carbon-producing thing, you can't do another, unless you pay handsomely in the purchase of more carbon credits. In twenty years time is seems likely that we will all have indivdual "carbon accounts" which will permit us to emit a certain amount of carbon, and if we want to go over that limit, we have to pay a huge amount of money more, which is then invested in environmentally friendly schemes and businesses. So, the Trabant driver in twenty years time will have to live in a well insulated, solar and wind powered home, and not be buggering off to the likes of Bratislava and Tallinn on regular weekend jollies via Easyjet, in order to avoid purchasing further carbon credits.

6. Trabant Owners have to come up with alternative motors The two stroke is an iconic part of the Trabant experience, with its marvellous ringing noise, jerky performance and general capriciousness; but its' days are very, very numbered. Car manufacturers are rapidly coming to the conclusion that the future of motoring is in "smart" or "hybrid" cars, which are economical and almost carbon neutral.

The electric G-Wiz (pictured) has similar performance to the Trabant, but only seats two, is slower, and can only go about 60 miles before the battery has to be recharged for 8 hours. Maybe developments in biofuels will help. But some enterprising fellow needs to come up with a new environmentally friendly motor for our cars, so that we can keep driving them without terrible pangs of conscience. I think we can forget the apocryphal story of US capitalists "Buying the rights" to the Trabant from VW, and making them in Uzbekistan. This seems to have been little more than a cheap PR stunt. if the future is in micro-cars, with a new, cleaner engine, there may yet be a future for the Trabant. The "New Beetle" worked, after all, and a clever marketeer wouldn't find it hard to make such a "New Trabant" trendy, and all that other guff. A carbon neutral car seating four, carrying a load of holiday baggage or shopping, easily maintained, capable of going at 50-60 mph, would potentially be a big draw. The Trabant, minus engine, weighs virtually nothing, so it wouldn't require a massive engine to keep it moving along. Readers will now be able to see why my promising buisness career never got off the ground. :(

All bleak- but sadly necessary-stuff. I love my car, but I'd give it up tomorrow to avoid the ghastly possibilities of towns like Montrose, where I live, becoming a New Atlantis- flooded, submerged and lost to rising tide levels; vast tracts of Africa being uninhabitable scorched desert, with millions upon millions of Africans displaced by desertification; regular water and power shortages and rationing; polar bear extinction; dead walruses being washed up on Scottish shores, starved to death after the desruction of their habitat in the North Atlantic and Arctic; a crude class divide between the ultra rich who can afford to keep on polluting as much as they want, and the rest of us; catastrophic, irremediable economic collapse; and so on.

We all have to help avoid such ghastly predictions becoming reality in the nearest of futures. I'll happily pay a lot more in "carbon offset" which will be here before long. Just a final thought- if anyone has done an emissions test on a Trabant and has the figures, I'd be very interested to hear about them. I'm pretty sure that 5000 miles a year in a Trabi doesn't produce as much carbon as 30000 miles a year in a modern alloy wheeled cigar tube, but it'd be nice to have the proof.

Trabant

Ding Dong the Clutch's Gone

2006-10-24T14:02:00.000+01:00

Arse!

It seems as though my last despatch was unfeasibly optimistic. The fuel filter being clogged idea has transpired to be the reddest of herrings; it now emerges that, all along, the clutch had been "slipping" steadily, and, yesterday, it finally packed in.

All started well in running Heather's wee one to school and, although the car was fine on the way into town, things all began to go Pete Tong on the way out. Hills that are normally comfortably taken between 60-70km/h became insurmouhntable, endless obstacles; the car drove as though towing a giant grocer's weight behind it. The car screamed up the hill back to St. Cyrus at 40 km/h and no more, and we just made it home. Still fixated on the "dirt in the engine" idea, I cleaned out the filter again, and took it out for another short hop to see if it was any better. Nope! This time the Trabant, screaming as though it was being pulled apart by two colossal trucks driving in opposite directions, dropped to 20 km/h, and the clutch pedal started flapping against my foot. Somehow I managed to enage third gear and it picked up alright, allowing me to limp the last kilometre or so home. There it stays still, irretrievably bust until a mechanic can come and tow it to a willing garage.

I've just ordered a new "clutch set" from LDM Tuning (at a cost of £75) so the parts are there, the next challenge is finding a mechanic brave enough and interested enough to take it on. The "chap from Lincoln" assures me that the job is a "piece of piss", but it is fiddly; the engine, front wheel hubs, driveshaft and gearbox have to come out before the terminally spannered clutch can be removed and replaced with a new one. That sounds a serious job, until one realises that a Trabant engine can be lifted out by one man without the need for blocks and tackles, etc, and replaced, within an hour.

The car was driving poorly, apparently, as the clutch was failing to transfer the power generated by the engine to the wheels etc. Humping the dart up hills at speed is a good way to grind the clutch into dust and it seems that recent trips up brutal hills will have done just that :(

So, I'm Trabantslos for at least a fortnight, until the new part turns up from Germany, and someone comes out to put the little bugger back together. The good news is that I now know what a kabbadied clutch feels like, for future reference. :(

(Any advice from other Trabant Drivers who have done this job before- and most have- gratefully received....)

A bit of maintenance...

2006-10-22T15:16:00.000+01:00

No major journeys this weekend in the Trabi, just a few short local hops.

On Friday I went to the opening of an exhbition in Forfar with Heather & a few other mates (driving back from Forfar with five folk crammed into the dart was, er, interesting). Both ways, the car was sluggish, refusing to get above 70 km/h and labouring badly in second and third gear. That respected Professor of Trabantology, "the chap from Lincoln", diagnosed a partial fuel blockage, and so on Saturday I rather nervously did my first bit of Trabant maintenace. I say nervously, as I'm usually the kind of cack handed arsewit who knocks down a retaining wall in attampting to put up a poster with blu tack.

The fuel filter required to be cleaned. This is effectively a little nozzle under the fuel tank, which looks rather like the tuning knob on a car radio. I unscrewed that gently, and the little filter beneath. This is a very flimsy piece of plastic and mesh which looks like it would disintegrate if one looked at it the wrong way,so that came off very slowly, too. There was a good deal of oily particles of silt in both, which impeded the flow of fuel to the engine and make the car perform poorly. The silt rather resembled the hard waxy unguent flushed out when one's ears are syringed at the doctor's- horrible, toxic stuff. Once washed in petrol and re-fitted, the Trabi was more or less back to normal, pulling much better and doing the cruising 80 km/h without too much encouragement.

With five people in it, the Trabant's handling becomes pretty iffy. The tail threatanes to spin out continuously on corners and one has to slow right down- exasperating on the bendy back road from Forfar back to Montrose. To the considerable surprise of those in the back, we made it without any hiccups. That included the man from Poland who will shortly be welding up the errant front bumper and hopefully (finally) fitting the in car entertainment system (see entries passim) as well. Strangely, despite spending his formative years under the Communist system, the man had never been in a "plastic dart", and was greatly taken by the fact that his first Trabant experience was in Scotland.

The Trabi attracted much attention this weekend too- every stop we made, someone came up to ask about the car. I had thought that people here had got used to the sight and smell of the sputtering sputnik by now, but obviously not!

Trabant on Video

2006-10-17T10:24:00.000+01:00

I've never felt the need to make that much use of the current internet phenomena, You Tube, the independent home video site founded only a year ago, and bought last week for the National Budget of Moldova by Google. Indeed, to be called a "tube" in Scotland is far from complimentary, so no doubt the site's name has caused a few sniggers amongst those fluent in Glaswegian. A brief perusal of some of the more outlandish material on there- twelve year old rappers straight outta Chester producing clunking rhymes on the "hoes" that have ruined their pre adolescent lives, and crews of Salford scallies producing epoch-defining hip hop about smoking biftas on the top deck of corporation buses "gittin on da buss wit ma day-say-vah"- suggests that the Glaswegian definition of "tube" is richly deserved.

However, it is a fairly rich source of material for those interested in Trabants, and I've just uploaded a pretty poor mobile phone processed video of the car smoking away on start up for readers driven to distraction by continual mentions of "blue oily smoke" in my blog entries. Once going, the Trabant doesn't smoke at all- certainly much less than some of the more "modern" windtunnel designed four alloy-wheeled cigar tubes I've seen on my travels. However, as you can now see thanks to the miracle of the internet, it smokes like an eighty-a-day pensioner for about 2-3 minutes once the engine is started. "It's like a lawnmower being started up" has been one of the less charitable observations, and certainly the dry, bitter, acrid smell of two smoke does linger in the palette somewhat. There's even worse "smoking" videos from some guy in Germany, who, as you can see, trails a dense plume behind him, like a Fokker Eindecker plummeting to its doom in 1918.

If you have a longer than normal lunch hour, I'd also recommend that you look at the extended car chase through the streets of Moscow from the movieThe Bourne Supremacy- one man, one Volga, against the entire Russian Police Force and FSB. Probably the most stunning car chase ever filmed- I thought that the legenadary romp through the streets of San Francisco in Bullitt could never be bettered, but this does it.

DDR Design by Taschen

2006-10-13T12:26:00.000+01:00

I've been meaning to review this little book for a while, having had it since about this time last year, but I've only just got around to it.

DDR Design is a coffee table book, with only a short essay at the beginning introducing the context of the extensive range of material goods that are illustrated. The introduction covers the rebuilding of the country after the war, the introduction of Ulbricht's New Course and consumer goods in the wake of the June 1953 East german uprising; the scrapping of Bauhaus style functionalism in favour of folksy kitsch; and, Honecker's encourangement of "socialist consumption" of the 1970s, when plastic darts and Wartburgs apperared on the road in numbers.

Everything is illustrated here, from bin bags to chewing tobacco. The latter mentioned look particularly brutal, with what appears to be rodent droppings in a horrible mouldy box. Many East German staples appear; Rotkappchen sparkling wine, Globus Green peas, some ghastly looking ersatz breakfast cereals, Klub Cola...

The Trabant is also illustrated in its later form, a page beinmg devoted to it, although there's not much else to excite the DDR motoring fan. I like this book though, it's cheap, functional, and has much strange material to interest the casual flicker on repeated visits. Recommended.

It's all in the gears, dear boy....

2006-10-13T12:13:00.000+01:00

And so three consecutive trips to Aberdeen, in the Trabi, since we last spoke, as I amassed a total of 400 kms over the weekend.

There wasn't a repeat of my horrific first experiences in the car on Monday last. The gears require careful coaxing up the irritating stop-start sweries of traffic clogged roundabouts, between the small bridge over the river and the hospital at Forrester Hill. One has to change down fast as the traffic slowqs- and never taker on a hill from stationary, in anything other than first gear. If one keeps changing down rapidly and doesn't try and speed up too fast, then the Trabi will take hills reasonably steadily. Phew.

On the way out, after the stone briodge and a bad roundabout that the council would appear to be too tight to mark out properly, there is a massive, slow, long incline that takes the car an age to labour up at no more than 60 km/h. Of course, on the opposite direction, it is tremendous fun, as the smoking dart scoots down at the maximum 100 km/h, or just over. The way up is much different, with the car emitting a whining growl like a mountain goat with stomach ulcers being asked to carry a heavy burden from one Greek mountain-top to another.

Happily both Heather's Dad and my Mum are now out of hospital and recovering at home. So, having mastered the St. Cyrus-Aberdeen Hospital route, it'll thankfully be a long while before I do that one again. The last time was great though, with the car rocketing back at a steady 90 km/h, prompting Heather to ask "is it just me, or has this car got a lot quicker?"

Hurrah!

The Pech Braes ay Aibrrrrrdeen

2006-10-04T09:11:00.000+01:00

A quiet time with the Trabant since my last entry, as both Heather and I have parents in hospital, and so spare time has been spent visiting them rather than on specious country journeys enveloped in a haze of blue smoke, and the ringing buzz of the tiny engine.

However, the one time we have beeen out, to Aberdeen, the car's huge dislike of hills was brutally reinforced. On our way to see Heather's Dad, who is recovering painfully from a smashed hip in the Granite City, we hit the rush hour traffic. Making painfully slow progress, we suddenly were confronted with a long, steep-ish hill and a series of roundabouts. Disaster. The Trabi can do hills in second or third gear, given a decent run up, but it's like drawing teeth when one starts at the bottom of a hill, from stationary. The car screamed and shuddered, like an infant rhinocerous denied a loaf of bread just as his yawning jaws threaten to snap shut. The speed kept dropping, dropping, no matter what I did with the gears. Fortunately, Aibrrrdeen drivers are much more patient than their Dundonian counterparts, and even though the engine was threatening disastrous meltdown, at 15mph, in the fast lane, nobody peeped. In Dundee, they peep impatiently if one hesitates a nanosecond too long as the traffic lights go to amber.

Cold panic had set in by the time I reached the hospital- after one final tortuous incline to reach the hospital car park, during which I thought the car might start to roll back. There has been conjecture that i was in third gear when I thought I was in first (this is an easy mistake to make with the mark-free gears-cigar to the right of the steering wheel), but then there was also fevered speculation at the time that my poor old Soviet car was, well, pish,("This motor's fuckin' brutal") and couldn't pull the skin off a rice pudding.

Fortunately the car took the steep, winding curve out of Stonehaven on the way back, without any difficulty, and the same up a long, wearying incline in between Stonehaven and Bervie. This rather confirmed the impression that I was in third all along.

Ooof. Not pleasant though. However, having stopped waking up sweating after this confidence draining experience, I shall be setting out on the same one-in-three Aibrrrrdeen assault course this weekend. Let's hope the little bugger makes it without complaining this time.

Fenland Flatland Recidivism

2006-09-25T12:42:00.000+01:00

My good friend "the chap from Lincoln", whom longstanding habituees of this grimy cyber-shebeen will remember as the previous owner of my own Trabant, has, as the above picture shows, been unable to help himself in recent times.

Writing to commiserate with me last week on my wretched failure to pass my driving test, he made his own shame-faced confession; the crumbling of a previously granite will regarding the purchaser of further Trabants. He has acquired the above example of a Trabant 1.1, at a knock down price, from a man who drove all the way to England from Hungary in it. With that spoiler, and the overall appearance of the car in the livery of an early 90s shell suit manufactured by "Jako" or some such, it's not hard to see how he couldn't resist.

My own plans to acquire a 1.1 (which Heather can drive) are still on, I've had a good tip on where I can find a very decent one and I am hoping to buy it in the new year, should the current owner decide to sell. I spent part of yesterday afternoon looking at 1.1s on the internet, and they do seem to offer a near perfect solution for the mechanically illiterate Trabant addict; a Trabant shape, which can be maintained at a local garage, as it has the gears and engine of a VW Polo from that era.

I'm afraid most of my friends are blaming the poor old 601 for my failure in the test last week. I was marked down heavily on my use of gears to begin with. The Trabant's gears, as outlined ad nauseam below, are certainly very unique, and the car does not always offer the smoothest of rides. However, the unfortunate instance of speeding right at the end of the test- which would have seen me fail anyway- certainly wasn't the fault of the Trabant. I misjudged things badly; coming over the hump bridge over the River South Esk, I scooted up to the "hump" doing the regulation thirty in third gear. Alas! I had built up too much momentum, and by the time the featherweight 'plastic dart' had reached the bottom of the hump, the speedo needle was quivering at about 65 km/h (just over 40 mph), in a 30 mph zone. Oops! Goodnight Vienna, I'm afraid, regardless of how well I'd managed in the previous part. So, not wishing to be cast as a bad workman blaming his tools, I'm not blaming the Trabi.

However the verdict has been less charitable from elsewhere. My Dad thinks I should bin the Trabi and "join the human race" by buying a one year old Fiat Panda (the ingnominy! no chance...) Others say I made it far too hard for myself driving such an eccentric vehicle, and that the instructor, in such unfamiliar surroundings, would have been hyper-sensitive to the slightest of faults. There may be something in that latter observation. So, alas, I am submitting to the chill wind of austere pragmatism, and spending the rest of my learner driver career in a modern car, simply to make it easier to pass the test, and not have the nervous examiner saying things like "does this thing have four gears, then?" next time around. Naturally the periodic bulletins from Aktuelle Kamera below will make no mention of the sad reliance on a capitalist-imperialist chariot, simply as an expedient means of losing my L-plates as quickly as possible.

Which brings us back to the "chap from Lincoln" and his new purchase. The Trabant, once one masters them, has an incredible hold on their drivers. I think it is not only their part in history, and the attention that they attract when out and about, but also that they are just such fun to drive. What other car could you name can be fixed by a novice at the roadside, with some pliers, twine and a handy collection of spare plastic bags? I must admit that, until I met Heather, I had zero interest in learning to drive, as I had never needed to. Doing so in such an interesting car, however, has really captured my attention this year, and I fully intend to persevere in the face of calls for me to, well, drive a desperately dull contemporary computer-car with ABS, power steering, heated accelerator pedals, pile-ameliorating seat covers, laser driven frappucino maker as standard, etc etc.

Readers can be assured, then, that the name of this blog will never change to the "Fiat Panda Driver" or some such dreary piffle. No one would read it, for a start (as opposed to almost no-one at present), and there wouldn't be much to say about it, either. "Drove to Aberdeen. Came home. Nothing happened."

I'm off to Aberdeen in the "plastic dart" this evening, having had a weekend with Heather completely away from the A92 and my usual haunts. In the next few weeks on here, I'm going to be adding a few more articles on films about East Germany, books, art, etc, so there will be a rich verbal two stroke mixture keeping things ticking along on here.

Thanks to all of you who wrote, or called, saying "hard luck", in the last week, it really meant a lot to hear from you all. I was quite miserable about it for a couple of days, but hey, it's all in the past now. I shall keep you posted on my latest attempts to overcome this "expected setback" on the road to actually-existing-driving-socialism. Check back soon!

Aktuelle Kamera

2006-09-21T12:42:00.000+01:00

Today our comrade Erich Honecker, First Secretary of the Socialist Unity Party and Chairman of the Council of State of the German Democratic Republic, dismissed as a capitalist-fascist fiction, the rumours that Comrade Steeplejack had ever sat his driving test. In fact, agents of the British secret services had infested his house with a plague of giant duraplast eating bolweevils, meaning that the test had had to be rescheduled for an indefinite date in the future. In such circumstances, said Honecker, the success of the Five Month Plan for Trabant Driving had yet to be determined, and would be reconsidered at a future meeting of the full plenum of the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party, in East Berlin. Comrade Honecker stressed the determination of the Pioneer Collective of Learner Drivers to redouble their efforts, working hand in hand with the ZK der SED and workers and farmers across our socialist fatherland, to overcome the problems of life-in-socialism, and fulfil the expectations of all DDR-burger, in passing the driving test at the first attempt.

In other news, the Secretary for Economics, Gunther Mittag, was pleased to announce a staggering 487% overfulfilment of the five month plan for the production of machine tools at the People's Owned Machine Tool Collective in Magdeburg.....

(I failed. Arse.)

Driving Test Approaches

2006-09-16T14:45:00.000+01:00

So, another weekend, another long drive, and a lesson.

Yesterday, I returned to an unusually sunny Dundee in the "plastic dart", taking Heather & bairn for a swim, and going out for dinner. On the way back, the car went like an absolute rocket up the A90, once the difficult steep hills on the Whitfield/Angus outskirts of the city had been negotiated.

This morning, I had another lesson for an hour, going through all the manoeuvres again, and feeling a bit more confident about them in the process. I was taken and shown the test centre, and spent a while practising reverse parking and three point turns.

So, my next entry will feature an ecstatic confirmation of a pass, or a teeth grindingly impatient notice of failure. The test is on Wednesday at 0840. I have to check the tyre pressures, wash the car, and spend hours going square eyed on the DSA website, practising my "qestions". Almost all of these are totally irrelevant to driving a Trabant- featuring as they do things like airbag, power steering, oil & coolant level, and catalytic convertor questions- but I still have to know the right answers.

As the clock ticks down, I shall leave you all with a picture I tried to post from my time in Tallinn, but failed. It is set in Kadriorg Park, near the new KUMU national art museum, and bids drivers: "beware of the squirrels".

Honestly!

Things don’t look so bad now…

2006-09-11T09:49:00.000+01:00

Following last week’s gloomy bumper-centric despatch, the Trabant skies have cleared somewhat this week.

As predicted, repairing the hole in the chassis would have been prohibitively expensive at a local garage. For some reason garages become very nervous about cars that fall outwith the familiar Ford-Vauxhall-VW-Audi-Renault-Citroen purlieu. The appearance of the ancient-looking 601 on a garage forecourt usually sends mechanics scuttling from view, like bees being smoked out of their hive. The hapless apprentice left behind to deal with the weirdo-wi-that-fuckin-weird-auld-motor hems and haws, quotes a ludicrous price, and garnishes that with the words “nane ay ays ken much aboot it, n ah wouldna want tae fuck it up fir yis eh.” Can’t say fairer than that!

Fortunately my next door neighbour knows a friend of a friend who can do some welding and, provided I can come up with the parts (ordered already from ldm tuning in Germany) and throw in the price of a decent night out, he seems willing to get stuck in. So, once the parts are here, the dart should be properly fixed up, after a weekend at Mavisbank. There’s been really good support and advice from the members of the IFA Club Yahoo group, all of whom advised me to avoid the garage like the plague, and try and do it myself.

The most frustrating thing about the saga-of-the-sagging-bumper was that it threatened to keep the Trabant off the road at a crucial juncture in my learning to drive, and causing a further maddening delay in the completion of the Five Month (sic) Plan. However, a laughable make-do-and-mend approach (see picture above) has secured the errant bumper for now to the crumbling bodywork.

Firstly, I procured a 24-inch baggage strap from the hardware store. I wrapped it around the bumper, threaded through the hole in the chassis, wrapped around the loose bracket, and hooked it up to the oh-so-convenient fitting behind the right hand headlight. Leaving the original plastic shopping bags in place, I also wound around some very strong garden twine around the detached bumper bracket and merged that with the baggage strap, so the bumper is almost back in its original position. It would take a trained eye to notice its slight lopsidedness now, although admittedly a less trained eye would pick up the strap and twine visible between bumper and bonnet, over the “radiator” grille. Still, this temporary repair makes the car roadworthy again and I’ve driven it extensively in the last couple of days. It won’t get through its MOT dressed like this, but hopefully by the time of the MOT the weekend welder will have done his stuff. The plan to take my driving test in it is back on, too.

A big garage bill at some stage in the near future is unavoidable, however. An ungaraged winter in the salty air of coastal Angus may well be fatal for the rustier bits of the this Trabant so, once my driving test is out of the way, and the bumper is welded up, I’m going to be taking it to a garage for a full anti-corrosion treatment, and to get my new radio fitted, before winter establishes itself. It is only a 1989 model, which hasn’t done a prohibitive amount of miles, and, bumper and worrying rust aside, there is nothing else wrong with it. My gloomy forecast, in my last post, of this Trabant taking the next exit off the autobahn of life, for the scrapyard, was undoubtedly premature. However,without these expensive measures, I fear for the plastic dart, at its January MOT, so needs must.

Thus strapped up, I took the Trabi on a two-hour driving lesson to begin with, on Friday afternoon, a session in which I was drilled in the various manoeuvers that will confront me in the test. The only one I was dreading was the emergency stop, but that was the easiest. In an emergency stop, the Trabi is so light that it comes to a halt without yawing, or the brakes locking, with the minimum of fuss. Parallel parking, and reversing round a corner, is slightly more difficult, as this involves controlling the car with the clutch alone, and looking round constantly like an air gunner looking for enemy fighters, which is a bit disconcerting. By now reversing round the corner isn’t too bad, but, even with a small car, parallel parking is brutal. In both these last mentioned drills, hitting the kerb means instant death as far as passing the test is concerned, and it takes much practice to avoid that grisly fate.

With the mirror-mirror-signal discipline of the driving lesson over, I had a long drive with Heather & her Mum to Aberdeen and a return to my favourite Lairhillock restaurant; Yesterday was spent tootling around locally, between St. Cyrus, Craigo and Montrose, and today, the passenger carrying lawnmower belted down the M90 towards Glamis and the Angus Folk Museum, touching the 100 km/h maximum in a few places. So, in total, I’ve driven about 250 - 300 kms this weekend, without too many hiccups (and, critically, the wayward bumper has behaved itself). It’s also harvest time in this rural area and, in the beautiful sun drenched days of early autumn, there’s little better time to be out and about driving.

My next entry on this blog will be my last before the great day of my driving test, on the 20th of September. The Montrose branch of the Socialist Unity Party are already planning a massive ticker tape parade down the High Street, with the massed ranks of FDJ gymnasts donning special uniforms to form a giant red-and-black human Trabant on the pitch at Links Park should I pass, so I’d better not let the people’s propagandists down. Should I pass, I’m taking Heather down to Edinburgh in the “Duraplast missile” for a long weekend, a fortnight hence. Failure, and we’ll be travelling by “First” Scotrail. Fingers crossed!

Bumper Disaster!!!

2006-09-03T12:32:00.000+01:00

So, back from Estonia for a few days, and with trouble-free 100kms round trip (taking in Glamis, Arbroath and Brechin) under the belt, things were looking good with the "plastic dart". I had been a little worried that my driving would be rusty and decrepit after a month away from the Trabant, but things were absolutely fine on the Friday.

Alas, things took a decided turn for the worse yesterday. Hurtling along the A92, on the way into Montrose, with my driving instructor in the pasenger seat, all of a sudden, there was a terrible screeching and grinding from the front of the car, a horrendous sound like an overweight African elephant having his calloused arse sandpapered by a hyperactive zookeeper. I brought the Trabi to a pretty swift halt and, when I got out, saw to my consternation that half the front bumper was hanging off the bottom of the car.

Basically, the right hand side bumper joint has rusted through completely and failed, with the 'metal' surrounding the now gaping hole in the chassis flaking and crumbling away at an alarming rate. I think that rustproofing was seen as a bourgeois decadence and inherently counter-revolutionary in the former DDR. Thanks to the invention of my driving instructor, a temporary and highly sophisticated repair was achieved by tying two Tesco's plastic bags together, and knotting them through the hole in the chassis left by the failed bumper joint, and under the rusted away join itself. (see picture above) This repair proved good enough to see the dart limping back to base. I was cheered up a little by some postings on the Yahoo! Trabant group, which suggested that such make do and mend interventions in response to rusty chassis are quite a common sight in the parts of Eastern Europe where the Trabant can still be seen on a daily basis.

That is cold comfort, however, for whilst the plastic bags may ensure that the Trabant can be driven locally, longer road trips are now out of the question until this failed joint has been seen to. Can you imagine the bumper coming adrift at 60 mph on a dual carriageway? That means an 'off the road' period of 2-3 weeks, I'dve thought, which means that sitting my driving test in the Trabant is probably out of the question, too. I'm now facing a crash (hopefully not literally) course in driving a 'normal' car before September the 20th.

Even having purchased a new bumper bracket from the redoubtable 'ldm tuning' in Germany, and doing my best to get the damaged bit prepared for repair, I'm looking at a big garage bill- perhaps, even, a terminal one, which is very sad and frustrating. Put it this way, if it's going to cost £500 to put this right, I might as well sell this Trabant as breaking-for-spares, and buy another.

It's been a bad week for various reasons which I won't bore you with, and this has just put the tin lid on it. :( Keep your fingers crossed for my visit to a local garage tomorrow.

Head Aega Tallinn!

2006-08-25T14:05:00.000+01:00

Well, that's me heading back to Blighty on Tuesday morning, so my month in Estonia- and a quiet phase for this blog- will draw to a close.

I've thoroughly enjoyed living here and cramming a year's worth of Estonian classes into a month. I can thoroughly recommend the courses I completed in Tallinn if you're ever going to need the language for whatever reason.

However, as soon as I get back, brutal driving reality will hit me like a chilly gust from the Baltic. I have a driving lesson on Wednesday, and then I imagine there will be a long road trip to Aberdeen or somesuch on the Friday with Heather & co. I have to build up my confidence again in the "plastic dart" in advance of the big practical test on September 20th.

I never did find a Trabant in Tallinn. My friend Michael sent me a picture of a redundant Estonian ZAZ, above, now being used as a flowerpot in Tartu, but, if there are any Trabants left here, they are quietly rotting away in summerhouse garages, or left for dead in the forest, having not turned a wheel for years. Oddly, my language teacher had just sold a ZAZ that had belonged to a deceased aunt; she fell about laughing when she realised my interest in the cars. Apparently they look so terrible so quickly, because they are made of a very soft metal that dents if you so much as look the wrong way at the car; conversation is apparently impossible in a ZAZ, going along at full steam, too, as the engine is so noisy.

I've just been passed by a massive wedding convoy. Here, in Estonia, the happy couple always travel around in one of those massive stretched white Cadillac limos, the kind that parties of office girls go out drinking in of a Friday evening in the UK. The bride and groom were wedged out of the sunroof, waving regally, as a deafening clatter of horns from passing traffic, and wedding guests, sounded. Quite a leap from such a cavalcade to the slow progress of the Trabi, which will be recommencing next week.

Check back soon, as updates will be more regular again from now on.

No Trabants but lots of pizZAZ

2006-08-08T12:30:00.000+01:00

I've been in Tallinn for over a week now. I'm having a hard working time trying to get to grips with the caprices and multiple word formations of the Estonian language, and doing various academic things in the afternoon. It's been a while since I've updated this page, but there's been little Trabant-related to say. If there ever were many Trabants in Tallinn, they have certainly all disappeared by now.

However the city is not without interest for fans of old COMECON cars. The most noteworthy that I've seen has been a fleet of five ZAZ 968's, late one evening, returning fro the spelndid Vanalinnas hostelry, Von Krahl. Suffice it to say that the Ukrainian built ZAZ (above) makes a Trabant look like a Lincoln Continental. Superficially, the car looks a little like the Trabant, but in practice has more in common with a British Hillman Imp- small, noisy, underpowered, rear-engined, and thoroughly unreliable. The car was just about the cheapest that could be ordered in the former USSR, and quickly became known as a "car for pensioners and intellectuals"- i.e., no matter how little one knew about mechanics, the ZAZ was simple and cheap enough to fix when it went wrong- as it did on an almost weekly basis.

"Look, look!" pointed out a friend of mine as these shrieking little beasts swept past, making a noise only usually associated with a 50cc scooter with a broken silencer. "They're Trabis, aren't they?" But no. It seemed that we had stumbled across a late night Estonian ZAZ club convention. The young lads who were passengers in the car seemed rather "tired and emotional" and the drivers whooped with glee, and parped their little horns, at the astonished reaction their mounts evoked from pedestrians. Some of the more drunk, staggering home, rubbed their eyes, as the ZAZ 968 at that time of night is the equivalent of the apocryphal pink elephant. What a motor!

For more of an ideas of just how enduringly hair-raising ZAZ ownership can be, check out this guy's story; a sorry narrative of engines on fire, broken gearboxes, brutally unreliable heaters, but, somehow, it still goes, can outpace both a Lada and a Moskvitch, is sturdy enough to "offroad" wthout much trouble, and is great fun. Apparently, one can buy a ZAZ in Moscow for just 100 US dollars; if I was here to settle, I must say I'd be tempted. The ZAZ never made it to the UK, and there are only two or three examples in the whole country, driven by diehard enthusiasts.

In contemporary Estonia, however, owning a car like a ZAZ 968 or a Trabant would evoke only pity amongst a people very thirsty for material success. Estonians view their period as part of the Soviet Union as 51 years of occupation. As Stalin's USSR took over here in August 1940, when no other country was able or willing to do anything about it, they have a point. Indeed visitors from the US and the UK are perhaps lucky to avoid a harder time from Estonians, as their governments shamefully colluded in the Soviet occupation at the end of World War Two, in a vain attempt to avoid confrontation with Stalin. A war memorial to Soviet dead is closely guarded round the clock by the local Politsei to watch out for attempted destruction by angry locals, who don't like the period of occupation being commemorated. Hence, continuing to drive the equivalent of a ZAZ or Lada over here is not the bit of fun it is in the West, but a sign that one is too poor to drive a coveted new vehicle, (BMW/Audi/Toyota/Chelsea Tractor), or, perhaps more dubiously, one is a Soviet nostalgiac having difficulty adjusting to the fact of Estonian independence.

There are also plenty of Moskvitch 412s and 2140s (illustrated) still on the go over here. The Moskvitch is like a bigger and much tougher Lada, whose familiar boxy form can also be seen in numbers in Tallinn. So heavy and sturdily built is this goliath that one wouldn't feel too exposed taking it into a tank battle. There is also a Moskvitch club here and the car is still held in quite a bit of affection by their Russian drivers. Oddly, Heather's parents briefly owned a Moskvitch 412 in the early days of their marriage, but were obliged to get rid of it when spares became unobtainable in the mid 1970s, when the car stopped being imported into the UK. They regretted its departure as it was cheap, very reliable, and would start unfailingly even at -10 degrees in the early morning of a freezing Scottish winter.

These marques have had contrasting fates since 1991; ZAZ was bought out by Daewoo and has re-established a measure of independence in the Ukraine, following the Korean company's collapse; amazingly, the outdated and heroically unreliable 968 was made until 1994. Moskvitch, meanwhile, went bankrupt in 2002, and although the company still exists on paper, it seems unlikely to re-emerge as a going concern.

The only piece of Trabant news is that my driving test is booked for 0840 on the 20th September, in Montrose. I return to Scotland on the 29th August so I shall worry about that when I'm back. Montrose feels a long way away at the moment, as my language studies and work mean that I'm thoroughly immersed in life here in Tallinn.

My driving instructor is counselling me to sit my test in a modern car, as he feels that the Trabi's grindingly low speed going up hills, and eccentric fourth gear, may counmt against me with a humourless driving assessor. Unless it really is impossible though, I shall be taking the "plastic dart"; anything else would seem like treachery.

More from here later in the month.

Greetings from Tallinn!

2006-07-30T16:48:00.000+01:00

A different entry for this blog today, as I am writing these words in a basement in Tallinn. On Saturday, I bid a tearful farewell to Heather & her family, and of course the "plastic dart", in order to spend a month out here working in the Estonian capital.

It's been hot and balmy in Tallinn today, and I've had a good look around. Whilst my neighbours Fiona & Gilies were delighterd to return from their holidays, with tidings of Trabants being sighted spluttering around Gdansk, I've had no such luck today. For Estonians, buying a new car is top of the list in terms of status, before refitting one's wardrobe, then maybe buying a house. As a result, although there are many reminders of the Soviet period in terms of buildings and monuments, there are very few old Communist era cars left here. I've seen the odd Moskvitch and Lada about the place, but, alas, no trademark pinging of a two-stroke engine or cloud of blue smoke from a Trabi. There's no culture of nostalgia for old times in Tallinn, which is making massive efforts to market itself as a leadinmg hi-tech tourist destination and cultural centre for the 21st century, and which has just been awarded the title of European City of Culture, for 2011.

I've been travelling pretty much since early yesterday, so my last day in Montrose on Friday seems almost a lifetime away already (a sleepless night on the floor at Stanstead surrounded by chatty Poles and Italians rather sees to that). In the end my farewell dinner was at the splendid Lairhillock Inn & Restaurant, just a few miles south of Portlethen. In driving terms, this was a significant trip, as much of it was completed in dense sea fog. The haar had rolled across Aberdeenshire in the late afternoon and visibility was down to about 30 yards in places, around Inverbervie, and at the stone bridge across the River North Esk, between St. Cyrus and Montrose. In fact the Trabi is almost perfect for these conditions- one can drive it along slowly, in a high gear, compensating for the fog's cloaking of a familiar road in murk, making it unfamiliar, and in places dangerous.

And so begins a month's break from the "plastic dart". I am going to be booking my practical test this week, but otherwise the car will be having a bit of a break- save for the odd short local hop with Heather or her Dad behind the wheel, to keep the battery alive and interested. All in all, with the long-ish journey to Lairhillcok and various local jaunts to Brechin, Forfar and Montrose, I managed to rack up 400 kms in the last seven days, driving it daily, so the break is thoroughly deserved.

The few hardy devotees of this periodic verbal spasm will be pleased to hear that I shall be keeping these pages up to date throughout my month away. What with, I don't know yet, but it'll be something Trabi related.

Stay tuned!

Announcement

2006-07-25T12:47:00.000+01:00

by our special corrspondent in the capitalist West

In an unparalleled leap forward for the global working class and the forces of socialism everywhere, our comrade, "Steeplejack", today passed his driving theory test at the first attempt.

Messages of congratulation immediately poured in fronm the Central Committee of the Socialist Unity Party, our Trade Union leaders, and comrades from the industrial combines and collective farms throughout our Socialist fatherland, and beyond.

Ruthless capitalist driving bureaucrats had tried to derail this heroic advance by asking irrelevant questions about oil dipstick levels, and on when a comrade needed to top the radiator up. Thanks to the ingenuity of our engineers and the unrelenting toil of our comrades in the car manufacturing combine, Trabants from our homeland have long since ceased to require such backward Western devices.

Our comrade, "Steeplejack", now faces his practical theory test in the sure knowledge of comradeship, solidarity, best greetings and gusts of oily blue smoke from across the brother socialist nations. Onward! Forward to a Successful Practical test!

This weekend's news

2006-07-24T11:39:00.000+01:00

"Well, that was an experience" said my driving instructor, at the end of my first official lesson on Friday morning. It was quite an interesting experience for me, too, as the instructor was able to point out various problems with my driving which I'll need to correct before we get to the sitting of the test.

My major problem, it seems, is that I'm revving up the car too much and putting too much strain on the engine. Remember my writing about the engine screaming in low gear? This, it seems, is down to me rather than the shortcomings of the engine. Apparently I'm leaving too long between gear changes, as well. So my task is to stop driving the car as though I'm flying an American crop dusting bi-plane, slow down a bit, and make sure that the fuel econometer never does much more than three green lights, other than over 50 mph in fourth.

The difference was obvious in our drive down to Dundee on Friday afternoon. Right enough, it took slightly longer to get there, but the engine was much happier and burnt much less fuel on the journey, so I was really pleased to have learned that simple but obvious lesson.

It's been a while since I really noticed how strnage people still find the Trabi, but in the course of driving all over Angus and Tayside this weekend we've passed through Brechin a few times, where the sight and sound of the Trabi has produced some comical slack-jawed amazement. Roll-up fags have literally dangled from bottom lips, fingers were pointed, as we sputtered on through. Suffice it to say that, if I were to cycle down South Esk Street in Brechin on a unicycle, whilst wearing a lumious pink ball gown and singing Don't Cry for me Argentina, the reaction would be much the same.

*Cough* That's enough of that. My new radio arrived swaddled in bubblewrap, and I managed to work out how it might be fitted, more or less. As with everything else in the Trabi, it seems ludicrously easy to fit, so hopefully the man in the garage will be able to recover from his shock quickly, and connect everything up in a couple of minutes. All that is necessary is to plug in the rubber aerial, the one speaker, and earth the radio in the chassis, and Robert would appear to be one's uncle.

The radio, an "Autoempfanger A-341-tournee", came in its original box, with a guarantee from September 1987 (alas the guarantee would appear to have lapsed, on the collapse of the DDR). It was strange leafing through the attendant info that came with it, with a ghostly list of radio experts in the former DDR, printed on the kind of rough green paper that the army used to issue to its worst recruits as bog roll, in National Service days. The radio itself was made in the same locality as the Wartburg, i.e. Eisenach (or, to give the factory its full imposing title, "VEB Elektrotechnik Eisenach Betrieb des VEB Kombinat Rundfunk und Fersehen DDR") A ghostly set of documents and labels from a dead state, almost like reading a dead man's private letters. Anyway, I'm off to get it seen to later today.

It could be that, in about 6 months time, we'll become a two-Trabant household as well. Longstanding lingerers in this little shallow puddle of cyberspace will remember that my girlfriend Heather, who is also learning to drive, really likes the Trabant but just can't get used to the unusual gears and fiddly choke, as she has been used to driving conventional modern cars. Rather than seeing her consigned to the ghastly anonymity of a Nissan or somesuch, I have suggested that we bring over a Trabant 1.1 from Germany once she passes her test, and the idea is being considered.

The Trabant 1.1 (see pic above) has a VW Polo engine, licence built in the DDR, and a 'normal' gearstick and transmission, and there is no need to mix oil into the petrol as the engine is a four-stroke. As will be seen, the change, as with many Soviet bloc cars just before the whole system collapsed in 1989, was basically a new engine and some cosmetic modernisation inside and out. This happened as hard pressed Politbururos across Eastern Europe finally accepted that the workers wanted something a bit better and faster, than an obsolete car first conceived in the age of the Heinkel and Messerschmitt bubble car. Both Trabant and Wartburg had tried since the mid 1970s to gain approval for updated and new models, only to be rebuffed by the SED leadership on grounds of cost and workforce re-training. The last attempt to do away with the ubiquitous 601, during 1982-3, saw an extemely strange Mini-Metro type prototype emerge from the Zwickau factory, but this, too, was turned down by the cheap suits on the Zentral Komittee.

Theoretically, the Trabi 1.1 should be easier to maintain, once one points out to the thunderstruck mechanic that it's basically a VW Polo with a Trabant body. "1.1s" tend to be a little bit cheaper as well, as Trabi enthusiasts regard them as 'not the real thing' becaue of the difference in engine and transmission. For example, there's a very decent one for sale for just 670 euros on German e-bay at the moment. We shall see, as a purchase of a 1.1- there are very, very few in the UK- would necessarily involve driving it back from Germany and importing it, but the idea of combining an old skool and modern Trabant rather tickles us both.

Oh, and it's my theory test tomorrow, so I'd best go and do some more revising. Puzzled visitors from outsie the UK can see what I'm on about by visiting the Official Theory Test website, and try it out for themselves, if they can be arsed to register. I shall keep you posted- toot the horn of your Trabi around 1130hrs UK time if you are out and about in it, to wish me luck.

Driving Lesson looms

2006-07-18T10:36:00.000+01:00

Although I've been sputtering about in the plastic dart for five months now, I actually have my first 'official' driving lesson on Friday morning, having found a local instructor who is willing to take his life in his hands and come out with me. I had a long chat with the man the other night, in which, rather worryingly, he expressed skepticism about my taking my actual test in the Trabi. He's going to check though and get back to me, the biggest problem is that the car is a left hand drive and this may not get past the bureaucrats at the DVLA. Having to sit the test in a normal car would be a bit of a nightmare, having got so used to my own, very different little car.

It seems also that there will be a minimum 7 week wait before I get to sit the practical test, assuming that I pass the irritating 'theory' component first, which I'm taking a week today. If I pass that, then the test will be sat sometime in early September, hopefully. In classic East German style, I'm going to supress all further mention of this failure to meet the initial five month plan target, before announcing a heroic step forward for the working classes when I pass my test in September. Readers in the meantime can send their own Eingaben to the e-mail address above, which will be suitably ignored by an overworked junior functionary.

In other news: amazingly, I have managed to obtain an original 1987 Trabant radio, which is still in its box and has never been used, which is a terrific result. It cost a fair bit but Trabant radios in that condition are now very hard to find. I very much doubt if I have the technical skills to fit it, so a local auto hi fi fitter can expect a puzzling hand grenade lobbed into his otherwise tranquil weekday, fixing and fitting Focuses and Vectras with their in flight entertainment systems, sometime soon. Thanks again to everyone who helped in my quest for a radio.

This weekend's driving took us back to Aberdeen, a much more tranquil journey up the A90 this week, featuring no selfish low loaders (though I was serially overtaken by buses and goods lorries, giving you an idea of a Trabi's slow progress up the shoulder of Scotland). On Saturday, there was a journey from Brechin to Arbroath along the rather demanding A935 road, which has long straight sections punctuated by stomach-content-voidingly tight hairpin bends. Tne Trabant hugs the road very well though, listing to port and starboard along these bends like an elderly little tug, bobbing in the wake of a giant ocean liner, as it leaves port.

Meandering Ramblings

2006-07-11T11:14:00.000+01:00

A drive up to Portlethen and Aberdeen this weekend, in which the Trabi's lack of acceleration was cruelly exposed. On the A92 in between Bervie and Stonehaven, I got stuck behind an absolutely massive low loading lorry, with some kind of half track digger on its back. The truck meandered about all over the place at just about 40 mph, and with the road so narrow only motorbikes were able to pass, which added to the nervy nature of the position I had right behind this colossal juggernaut.

The lorry itself was about as long as Oxford Street, so I had simply no hope of passing it. The Trabant has virtually no accelerating power at all when in fourth gear and doing 40 mph, up a slight hill, as I was then. To attempt to have passed the lorry would have meant almost certain disaster and head on collision. A long queue of frustrated traffic built up behind us, crawling along, as the lorry driver selfishly refused to give way despite many opportunities to do so. I eventually squeaked past, taking about 30 seconds to do so, on the dual carriageway, after the motoring floodtide had swept past at much greater speeds than I was capable of. Even then, three amber lights were showing by the time I passed the low loader, and the car wasn't very happy. Whoever that myopic and self centred lorry driver was, I hope his next shite's a hedgehog.

The way back was much more pleasant and relaxed. I was treated to a birthday tea in the excellent Cutty Sark pub/diner in Inverbervie which has amazing seafood, and a decent atmosphere- definitely five Trabant Driver stars. The pub is named after Bervie's most famous son, one Hercules Linton. A man rejoicing in such an overblown moniker can only be a Victorian, and it turns out that Linton designed The Cutty Sark one of the UK's most famous historic sailing boats, now drydocked at Greenwich in London. From the hazy days of my late teenage years I think I can also remember a particularly nasty blended whisky named after the Cutty Sark.

Many people e-mailed with help in response to my last article and I am now tracking a Trabant radio on the German version of e-bay. I had become so frustrated in my serarch for one that I hadn't taken this obvious step and am now tracking an example closely on the site. Hopefully I'll be able to secure it before I go away to the Baltic States in August. Thanks so much to everyone who took the time and trouble to send me info and technical advice on the Trabant radio -it is much appreciated.

It seems that the German version of e-bay is probably the best place to start if you are considering buying a Trabant- there are a few excellent examples of the car for sale over there at the moment, for some decent prices. Obviously you'd have to drive it back to the UK from Germany, which would be a few days worth of adventure in itself. But those tempted can take a look at what's for sale at E-Bay Deutschland, there seem to be some real bargains to be had, not only for the Trabant, but also for those keen on the Wartburg, or for those with a lot of time on their hands, the East German version of the Commer van, the "Barkas".

Oh, and my driving theory test's booked for the 25th July, in Dundee, and if I pass, and can squeeze in my practical test before I leave for Estonia, I can put up a celebratory poster on here for overfulfilling my personal five-month plan. Hoorah.

Radio Ga Ga?

2006-07-01T20:21:00.000+01:00

Invoking the title of one of Queen's most noxious examples of muscial flatulence hardly bodes well for the rest of the post, but hear me out.

The one thing the Trabant I have lacks at present is a radio. There is a space for it, currently covered up by a metal panel with the company logo on it. When I bought the car, I thought it would be a relatively easy matter to hoover up a second hand Trabant radio, but I have been driven to the brink of frustrated insanity at my failure to find one.

An article on the internet tells me that the typical Trabant radio was called the "Schoenberg Super" and that one can still be fairly readily obtained for about £50. Not on the internet, it would seem. I have drawn a repeated blank on e-bay looking for one (on e-bay one can normally purchase anything from a Zimbabwe one day cricket shirt, to an elderly misanthrope's toenail collection, but not, it seems, a Trabant radio) and indeed typing "Trabant radio" into google yields the one article already mention, a wheen of spare part sites that no longer exist, and breathless fan pages for some rock group combo going by the name of "Trabant".

So, any help gratefully received, readers. if you know of someone looking to offload a Schoenberg Super, drop me a line, or leave a comment here!

*Bangs head off keyboard in frustration*

eohf;weo'#vnro

The People's State?

2006-06-30T12:33:00.000+01:00

I've just finished reading Mary Fulbrook's very impressive The People's State: East German Society from Hitler to Honecker. Effectively this is a social history of the DDR which eschews the familiar laborious analysis of political organisation and structure, in favour of the many lived realities of ordinary lives in the defunct state.

Fulbrook does a very good job of setting aside the more familiar approaches to East Germany, and demonstrates well that the old party vs. people, Stasi vs. dissidents, enlightened vs. apparatchik, are too simplistic and reductive to have a decent understanding of how the place worked (or didn't work, in the case of the last 4-5 years.)

The familiar stereotype of the DDR is of a grey, humourless, joyless country, where fun and consumer items were almost non-existent, a place where a sullen, repressed populace was stifled by top-heavy party bureaucracy, and terrorised by the vast array of the Stasi. Fulbrook recounts well how hours and hours of patience and a fistful of unofficial 'contacts' were required to source scarce goods that are now taken for granted; things like banans, which produced near-riots at some KONSUM supermarkets when they became fleetingly available, or indeed, coffee, the high global price of which provoked huge shortages at the end of the 1970s, provoked a national scandal in a caffeine dependant country.

Fulbrook shows how East Germany had at least the appearance of a 'participatory dictatorship'; a place where there were official channels for citizens to complain, demand improvements, ask for obvious injustices to be righted. Under the 'honeycomb structure' of the East German hive, a highly stratified and authoritarian society engaged paternalistically with its citizens. Whilst such Eingaben or petitions were turned down more than they were acted upon, it at least gave the state the opportunity to pretend that it would one day fulfil everyone's wishes so that there would be no more complaint. Fulbrook shows that many middle ranking functionaries were fired by an idealism and a genuine concern for their fellow citizens, attitudes not shared by those at the very summit of the SED organisation.

The reality of power in East Germany, was that it rested in the hands of two individuals, from 1971; Staatsratsvorsitzender and General Secretary of the SED, Erich Honecker, and his "Economics Minister", the bullying, authoritarian Gunther Mittag. Honecker, having engineered the overthrow of his mentor and patron Walter Ulbricht, was obsessed with two things; keeping the prices of everyday goods down, and keeping rents and rates to an absolute minimum. The latter ambition might be okay in a Tory run Home Counties local authority, but it was to prove a disaster for the DDR. Honecker's policies built up such a colossal debt by the end of the regime that the DDR was close to fiscal meltdown, without the intervention of geopolitical events that overwhelmed it.

As for Mittag, his arrogance ensured 1. massive loss making enterprises both in agriculture (insisting on planting the wrong type of crop in the wrong areas of the country, flying in the face of advice from xperienced local farmers) 2. a hideous environmental legacy as one of the biggest polluting states in history (the DDR was forced to rely on brown coal as its main source of energy, particularly after the Russians steeply reduced their supplies of oil in the mid 1980s.)As a result, towns such as Eisenhuttenstadt, built as an 'ideal socialist city' in the 1950s, were appallingly polluted by the 1980s, and are still struggling to overcome this period in environmental terms.

In the context of such political incompetence of the first water, East Germans further down the line tried to adapt as best they could to a political structure that they could influence, but stood no chance of changing. Fulbrook details well the drudgery and shocking disregard for personal safety in the DDR's antiquated industries, and the dissent from such conditions by chronic absenteesim and drunkenness at work. The worst lot of all in the DDR seemed to be that of the minor SED functionary working at a local level. One had to field and administer complaints of all kinds in a very long working week, and in one's spare time could not be seen to participate in the black market for consumer goods, or in many of the productivity dodging that characterised the workforce that remained aloof from the state apparatus.

A fascinating, poignant and eye opening account of the nature of everyday life in East Germany. Trabant fans will be disappointed as it barely features, other than in the photo section. A photo of a block of flats at Cottbus in the summer of 1989 shows every single car in the distance, to be some variant of Trabi. As the state moved towards inevitable collapse, the waiting list for a car stretched up to 18 years hence. Just a few months after this photo was taken- citizens could have had a choice of any trabant they wanted for virtually next to nothing- hardly any of them did, however.

Highly recommened.

Trabant Land Speed Record Broken

2006-06-15T12:57:00.000+01:00

A busy week in the Trabi, having been back and forth to Dundee twice, and tootled about locally all over the place. Amazingly, the car starts faithfully every time and, fingers crossed, has yet to give me any mechanical trouble.

On the second of my journeys to Dundee I managed to nearly reach 70 mph. So what, most of you may be thinking, but 70mph in a Trabant is like doing 120mph in a Ford Focus. The M90 from Dundee to Aberdeen is a series of gentle slopes and inclines. Hurtling downhill on a long-ish slope, the needle on the speedo registered 100 km/h, the previous record, and kept going up...and...up...and...stopped at 110 km/h (69mph). One would have expected all three amber lights on the econometer to be glaring, but in fact only two green lights were showing, as the car was 'freewheeling'. There was no rocking or shaking, although I was terrified that if I pressed the accelerator the engine would simply fall out. Great stuff!

Indeed, the higher the gear, the happier the Trabant. In first and second gear (covering all speeds up to about 45 km/h) the car screams and the amber lights come on at the slightest provocation. In third gear, things are a little less tricky, although above 70 km/h the car vibrates alarmingly. However, fourth gear, once engaged, sees the engine becalmed. Driving about 60-70km/h in fourth is the best ride one can have in a Trabant, as it seems to glide along softly, the engine noise softened to a low whine instead of a harsh agonised snarl. If one can imagine being transported by a small, endearingly bad-tempered camel, with a dicky ticker, one can also imagine being driven in a Trabant.

It's been very hot, recently, too, which, alas, turns the inside of the Trabant into something of a greenhouse. In recent days long journeys have proven to be stifling in the back, unless the windows are wound down fully. The 'cold' air lever seems purely theoretical and one can't open the rear windows at all. Hence, if left for any time at all in the current hot sun, the Trabant becomnes very, very hot indeed inside. If East Germans grew tomatoes, I'm sure they could have done worse than to convert a broken down Trabi into a makeshift greenhouse- it would certainly have been humid enough to have yielded a fairly decent crop.

Unless you've been living in a remote cliffside cave in the Faroe Islands with only fulmars for company, you'll have realised that the 2006 FIFA World Cup in Germany is now well under way. Naturally this has led journalists of all description to desperately fill rolling news networks and websites with any kind of trivia, as long as it is related in some way to Germany. MSN's pisspoor online "Trivia" section had, yesterday, a 'top ten of worst German cars'. The Trabant inevitably made it, with all the usual Cold War lies recycled yet again (..smoky...smelly...unsafe...made out of cardboard and cotton wool...engine of a haridryer...) 17 years after the fact. In what was one of the worst articles I've read all year, the 'journalist' expressed astonishment that the car was in fact safe, as shown in 1991 crash tests, and his bottom lip trembled even more at its current status as a cheap collector's car. Always a shame when the facts torpedo a load of clicheed old piffle.

More happily, my correspondent Andreas Windisch from Southern Germany sent me an excellent photo of a convoy of Trabants on their way to Salzburg on a weekend jaunt a few weeks ago. A fine time he seems to have had of it, too, even if his planned shots of Salzburg Castle proved impossible. Thanks Andreas!

More soon.

Czech Trabi & Jottings

2006-06-06T11:45:00.001+01:00

My friend 'The Edge', now resident in the Czech Republic, sends me the above photo of a Czech Trabi which still sputters about in his home town over there. As with many examples of the car still in use, this one looks like it's been cobbled together from a few different old cars, now motoring on the VEB autobahnen in Trabi-heaven. The BMW badge, replacing the geometric Sachsenring "S" on the bonnet is a little ironic touch- I've seen quite a few photos of Trabis altered like this. As a slightly realted aside, I was recently reading about a Slovak policeman (the connectivity of the internet, eh)who was musing wistfully on his easy life when the streets of his town were filled with pre-1989 ~Skodas and Trabants. "We never used to have many accidents, mused the copper, "as Trabants didn't go fast enough for anything serious to happen. But now..."

As for my own Trabi, excursions have been a little limited of late, owing to various weddings and family events in the last couple of weekends. Heather & I still run the car every weekend but there have been no longer journeys to tell you about in the last fortnight. The only noteworthy incident was Sunday last, when we were running Heather's niece home to her mum. The girl said "this car goes really fast" (bless) upon which Heather's daughter (aged 5) burst in with the shouty-crack corrction, "It's not a car, it's a Tra-BANT", with the comedy emphasis that small children have on the last syllable of any given word.

Future schoolteachers seem certain to be flummoxed, as I think she's the only pre school child in Scotland who knows what a Trabant is.

Driving test being booked shortly, so watch this space for further developments.

The Blue (Smoke) Danube

2006-06-01T09:35:00.000+01:00

My friend Maalie recently enjoyed a holiday in Romania, and he was good enough to send me a few photos of 'plastic darts' that he encountered on his travels. Hardened Trabi-enthusiasts will be delighted to see roof racks in both these photos, which are apparently rather rare. Here are Maalie's best two photos below:

The first shows a Trabant with a visible watermark, after the recent floods in Romania. I wouldn't like to have the job of making this little blue one roadworthy again. the engine would have to be dried out, the insides completely replaced to avoid mould and stinking mildew, etc. To be honest I'd be surprised if this car's next destination was to be broken up for spare parts. :(

Maalie was startled by the above Trabant as it hurtled past him, bound for Bucharest at 90 km/h, wrapped in a dense haze of oily smoke. Trabants are famous for 'smoking' profusely, but in fact I've found that, once the engine is started and warmed up, they don't smoke any more than an ordinary car. I suspect this bloke has left his choke half out and has forgotten, or has added a bit too much oil to his petrol.

Both these photos show that Trabants are still in everyday use across Eastern Europe, some 17 years after the collapse of the Soviet system. Indeed one is more likely to see a decent Trabant in ordinary use somewhere like Romania. In Germany, numbers on the road continue to fall steeply every year, with fewer than 60,000 Trabants now registered, from a total of over 200,000 at the turn of the century.

1,000 mile landmark!

2006-05-21T21:22:00.000+01:00

On the narrow and winding road up the lovely Glenesk , today, en route to lunch at The Retreat, the Trabi shuddered past the 1,000 mile (1,500 km.) mark since my purchase of it in February.

The major events since my last entry have been two round trips to Dundee (around 39 miles each way). The chosen route has been down the A92 to Arbroath, then over a new dual carriageway to the outskirts of Jute City. The road via Arbroath is relatively easy, but Dundee, for the novice driver, is a heart-stopping experience. there are one or two roundabouts that look like novelty strands of children's spaghetti, and are just as confusing to disentangle- all whilst the plastic dart whines down from third to second at 50 km/h. Although my heart was thumping round the worst of these giant obstacle courses, they passed off without mishap.

The nightmare I had was leaving the lights on, before attending a gallery opening in Dundee on Friday. When Heather, Giles and I returned to the car at 23.30 hours the red tail light was glimmering very dully. True enough, the battery was so dead that the starter motor wouldn't even turn and an attempted push start yielded little more than Giles and Heather falling over at various points (Giles, underestimating the Trabi's lightness, fell headlong into a puddle). To my acute embarrassment and the good natured laughter of the others, the AA had to be called to jump-start the dart.

Today's journey was a much less stressful one, whistling along the A935 like a little red sidewinder on the way to a distant target. We stopped awhile in Edzell, an old military town which is still thriving in the wake of the RAF's departure, as part of the wretched Cold War "dividend". The roads are straight and true around there, and the car nudged up towards 60 mph in spots. A total contrast to the snaking, hairpin bends, hidden dips and standing water on the narrow and exhilirating road on the way up to Glenesk, which unfolds through some of the most amazing scenery this side of the Highlands. Looking up briefly from the repeated very sharp bends, I saw densely wooded hills lose their heads in low hanging mist and clouds, as some cattle chewed over meditatively- a truly timeless scene.

Amidst that beauty, the motorised rollerskate appeared even more surreal.

Demographics & Contact!

2006-05-11T12:05:00.000+01:00

Since I started this site in February traffic has been increasing steadily. It has been interesting to see where many of my visitors are coming from. I have only a few regular "local" (i.e. from the UK) readers, with the majority of visitors coming from Germany, the Czech Republic, Romania and Bulgaria. Indeed in the last named country this little puddle in cyber-space has provoked seemingly lively discussion on the "2T Power" forum, which seems to be devoted to old East German cars, and, for some reason, a Peugeot Owners messageboard, too. I can't read Bulgarian so can't tell you exactly what they are thinking.

I have also set up an e-mail in case anyone wants to get in touch; trabidriver@hotmail.com Welcome one and all, wherever you hail from; and please drop me a line with any Trabi related questions, advice or comments, or leave me a comment here.

Journeys & Jottings

2006-05-08T21:24:00.000+01:00

Time for another of my fortnightly encyclicals and news of the 'plastic dart'. My learning to drive has now reached the stage where I would feel confident taking the Trabant out on my own- but of course the terms of one's provisional licence prevent this, and it really isn't worth being caught for, as a ban would be likely. Driving such an unusual car increases the likelihood of being stopped by a curious policeman.

Since we last spoke I've been down to Forfar and Kirriemuir, and up the coast again to Stonehaven, Inverbervie and Portlethen. I'm becoming quite familiar with the A92, and the trip to Forfar was the Trabant first outing on a dual carriageway since I bought it. It's on the dual carriageway that one realises how slow this motorised rollerskate is. Or, at least, I did when overtaken by two articulated lorries in quick succession. The Trabant is deceptive; low-slung, and very light, it feels as if one is going much faster than one actually is, until passed by a shoal of 'normal' cars doing normal dual carriageway speeds.

However, on a slight incline just outside Forfar, and in fourth gear, the car nudged 100 km/h, which is its absolute maximum speed. Any more, and it will assume the properties of an errant satellite on re-entry, and simply break up. On the same journey, I managed to do my first over-take; as we swept past a trundling tractor, a ragged cheer went up from my laughing passengers. Although people round these parts are a little more familiar with it, the Trabi still attracts much attention. Coming home from Bervie the other night, a gang of skaters made the Bill & Ted style 'devil's horn' gesture with their hands, en masse, which we gleefully reciprocated. The choke was still on, so whether the lads enjoyed the cloud of blue oily smoke trailed in our wake will remain speculation, alas.

It's a great time of year to learn to drive. The East Coast of Scotland is almost at it's best in late spring. Driving home at around 2030hrs, with the beautiful clear light slowly sliding into gloaming over the North Sea, the coastline an inky blue smudge and the lights of Montrose beginning to twinkle in the distance, it feels great to be on the road, the gutturally growling motor hirpling us slowly home.

The image accompanying this post is a propaganda poster produced to accompany the eleventh congress of the ruling Socialist Unity Party in 1986. The SED held major congresses every five years, to set the policy goals and direction for East Germany, and of course, this XI. Parteitag was to prove the last. The XII. Parteitag was scheduled for 1991, by which time the party and country no longer existed.

As you'll see from the poster, East Germany's rulers were somewhat obsessed with machine tools and machine tool production. The regime gained a lot of currency from machine tools sold to the capitalist enemy and within the COMECON bloc, and machine tool workers were poster boys for the party, their heroic achievements in overfulfilling successive five year plans delightedly recorded in posters such as these. Trabant workers had something of a lesser profile, presumably as the car was so ubiquitous, but nonetheless Trabant production was the subject of intense debate and interested scrutiny at these party congresses. The figure set for Trabant production was often one of the more eagerly awaited figures, as people would then be able to judge the relative harshness, sorry 'ambition', of the five years of economic activity to come.

Alas for Honecker and his comrades on the Zentral Kommittee, the successes of highly specialised industries such as machine tools, and the popularity of the Trabant in other socialist countries, couldn't cover up the glaring problems of an economy as stagnant as the DDR's. Had the Wall not fallen in 1989, the DDR would probably have collapsed in ruin in the 1990s, as a consequence of several disastrous economic planning decisions made in the 1970s and 1980s. In fairness, the DDR was never going to be a computer/microprocessor superpower, yet untold Ostmarks were poured into a doomed attempt to rise to dominance in these industries. A people's owned microprocessing plant in Eisenhuttenstadt challenging Intel-Inside for technological hegemony in the twenty first century is a delicious prospect, but one always going to remain in the realms of fantasy.

As for my own Five-Month Plan, I am pleased to report that I shall be having driving lessons, formally, in June, and hopefully will sit my test in July. The fulfilment of my driving production quota rather depends on a driving instructor exisiting round here who is willing to sit with me in the 'Duraplast bullet'. I'm working on it, and will keep you informed on here.....

A Little Bump, and Petrol Panic

2006-04-26T09:32:00.000+01:00

A long weekend, last weekend, with probably around 80 miles in total driven. I'm now beginning to get the hang of driving in general, although, as always, little incidents puncture any incipient complacency.

The Trabant drove very well all day on Saturday, probably to do with the fact that I remembered to release the handbrake this time. We made it to Forfar and back in the gloaming, then back from the legendary Anchor bar in Montrose's Ferry Street, to St. Cyrus. I had my first evening as the 'designated driver' last Saturday and didn't touch a drop all night. I did enjoy the Sunday morning no-stinger dividend.

On Sunday I seemed to spend the whole day at the wheel, with varying results. We decided to head up the coast to Stonehaven, a beautiful little town about twenty miles from Montrose. It was a clear and bright day, and Stonehaven beachfront was packed with day trippers and locals giving their new summer wear a first airing. All was going well until I reversed straight into another car from our parking space. Highly fortunately, the Trabant wasn't damaged at all, but someone's Ford Focus had it's bumper damaged. They were parked in a ludicrous and dangerous position but then I wasn't looking, so....a minor insurance or two minutes in the garage should do it, though, nothing too serious.

Slightly crestfallen, we headed back towards St. Cyrus. About five miles shy of our destination, the machine began shaking and the engine sputtered erratically. The speedometer needle dropped relentlessly in spite of my best efforts to keep it going. Then it cut, and the car drifted to a halt at a tight corner on the A92. This was an atrocious position- straddling both sides of a busy road where modern cars whizz by at 70 mph. For a brief moment I felt like the silent movie damsel tied to the railway line as a speeding express train approaches. A long and endless column of such cars crept past the stationary Trabant, open mouthed Sunday drivers gawping like goldfish out of a bowl. With the road clear, I let the car freewheel backward- and the engine started again.

We managed another mile or so, and then, on a corner, the engine cut again, with the red light on the speedo showing. At this point, I thought that something mechanical had happened and I gloomily contemplated the several hundred euros bill of importing new parts from Germany. Having jerked, spluttered and crawled on the back road to behind Heather's house, the car gave up altogether, and drifted to a halt, the engine dead.

I still know roughly as much about Mandarin Chinese as I do about car engines, so I thought that the getting out of the car to prod at the dead engine was merely a token gesture of defiance in the face of the engine's intransigence. The Trabant doesn't have a fuel gauge- the 'fuel gauge' is a dipstick that one sticks in the petrol tank. Prompted by Heather's Mum, I checked the fuel more in hope than expectation- and found that there were less than four litres left. It was a huge relief. The car's pisspoor performance over the previous few miles had been due to the tank running dry- and, switching to reserve, it picked up again normally, without any difficulty.

Later in the evening, having got over the upset of these scares, we drove up the Hill of Garvock, a local beauty spot where one has an amazing view of the Angus Glens and the rolling countryside of Kincardineshire to the north. It was blowy, and getting cold as the sun slowly sank to the west, but a transfixing view. The Trabi had laboured up the hill (it really does not like hills and protests vociferously at anything more than a 1 in 10 incline) and the roads were tricky, with Swiss-style hairpin bends, but there were no further alarms.

So, I learned two things this weekend; don't reverse without looking, and switch to the reserve tank when the engine starts dying for no apparent reason.

We'll see if I remember these lessons tomorrow, when I'm facing my biggest drive yet, taking Heather, her Mum, and her Mum's friend shopping in weither Aberdeen or Dundee. In the evening, we're all off to see, appropriately enough, the DDR movie "Goodbye Lenin!" (see entry below) at Montrose Picture House. Their faith in my erratic driving skills and in the 'plastic dart' is touching.

This weekend....

2006-04-18T10:34:00.000+01:00

The longest drive yet, around 30 miles on Saturday afternoon, in and around Montrose. Into town; out to Duninald estate; back into town; out to Craigo; round the beach front by St. Cyrus, including a brutal 1-in-5 hill start, and back home.

And best of all, the Trabant is virtually impossible to stall. There was one occasion, round a roundabout, where we juddered furiously for five seconds, then it picked up again gloriously.

Quality.

Building up some confidence.....

2006-04-14T18:20:00.000+01:00

Once again it's been too long since I dipped my quill pen in some cyber ink on this blog. However, the weather has been beautiful and the 'plastic dart' has been out and about quite a bit more as a result.

For a start, the Trabant is much more willing to start now it is a bit warmer. In winter, if you leave it for longer than 24 hours, it requires jump started, or even pushed down the hill, before it phut-phuts into life. Now, with the frosts receding and temperatures in this part of the globe inching towards a near-Caribbean 11 degrees, it flutters into life at the first turn of the key, rumbling like a drunk's early morning dyspepsia.

I've been on a couple of ten mile round trips in it now and I am much more comfortable being on the road in general. Twice I've been from St. Cyrus to Craigo and back, a beautiful country drive which is challenging, but which has the added bonus of not having too many cars on the road. The gears, which at first seemed cantankerous and disobliging, now come easily, even the tricky freewheeling fourth.

The only problems with the car have been entirely due to my own grandstanding incompetence. On one trip back from Craigo, the machine drove appallingly, crawling up hills, burning huge amounts of petrol according to the fuel econometer, and I couldn't get it in fourth at all. the reason only became apparent when we came to a stop at home, myself somewhat chastened at a poor performance behind the wheel. I'd only driven home with the handbrake half on, which really didn't help. The back wheels were really hot at the generated friction, although fortunately no lasting damage resulted. The Trabant has an excellent handbrake; when it is fully on, it will take a tank to shift it. Funny now, but I was furious with myself at the time for potentially damaging the car. But it's okay.

Leaving aside such instances of devastating arsewittery, it is proving great fun to drive and is generating as much interest as ever. Once fourth gear is engaged and you're heading downhill, it glides beautifully.

Once my work eases off towards the middle of May, I'm going to be out in it a lot more, building up towards my test- and hence this blog will be updated much more regularly.

First faltering steps

2006-03-26T21:18:00.000+01:00

The Trabant has lain idle for a couple of weeks, as Heather & I have been really busy at work. The weather has also been persistently foul here, with the snow giving way to high winds, and the kind of spiteful icy rain which hits one like a freezing quiverful of arrows, as soon as the front door is opened.

However, with the first signs of Spring finally showing, about a month late, the machine was jump started into life today and I managed to pootle around for about 10 kms worth in it. For a learner driver, driving at any speed can induce a frisson of panic, but by the end I was quite happy sputtering along at 60 km/h in third gear.

The Trabant requires a great deal of natural co-ordination if it is to be driven successfully. It is started on full choke, and one has to remember to put the choke in half way after half a mile, then in altogether after about a mile, otherwise the engine floods. The gears require much concentration, with changing down from third to second being particularly brutal; the lever has to go up, then in, then up again, and it doesn't always happen smoothly. At moments like that, with the engine screaming, the 'fuel econometer' showing 3 amber bars, and the car shuddering, time stands still, and you have an intimation of how a defender feels as the ball slowly trickles into the net in front of a baying end of home fans for an own goal.

That's the one slight downside, otherwise, driving this little thing is hugely enjoyable. It hugs the road very well, and the steering is extremely sensitive and responsive. Once one actually gets it going, and the engine is running without threatening to cut out, it's quite straightforward to drive. It's good to choose a Sunday to drive it in, too, as the country roads round by heather's house were very quiet. I stopped to let one car pass, and the driver crept slowly around the stationary Trabi, shaking his head and laughing. That's the other good thing about it. A learner driver can drive absolutely appallingly, and even the most curmudgeonly of fellow motorists will let you off without even the briefest of exasperated parps on their horn, because "look at fit the boy's drivin, ken. Eh's brave gannin oot in that, right enough.".

The weather's getting warmer, and work will soon ease, so I expect to be out in it quite a bit from the end of April onwards, just to get my confidence up and master the more arcane bits of driving, like reverse parking, etc. Heather has a quite a few horse shows to go to in June, July and August, and there are often stands for vintage cars as well, so I'm going to be taking it around those, too, if I pass my test in time.

More soon!

Ostalgie & Goodbye Lenin!

2006-03-05T15:06:00.000Z

"Mission Control" yesterday

Yet more freezing conditions this weekend in Angus. My face almost froze in a truly Arctic breeze yesterday, and I awoke this morning to find two fresh inches of the white stuff lying, with a hangover softening mini-blizzard in progress. All of which mean that my planned outing in the plastic dart has been shelved, and it stays under its cover. The seasons are utterly scrambled. It is supposed to be spring, yet it feels like the week before Christmas here.

All of which mean that I've had more time indoors this weekend. I've been thinking a bit lately about the Ostalgie phenomenon, or, for the uninitiated, a feeling of nostalgia for the former East Germany, in the post-reunification years.

East Germany, doubtless to the horror of the SED's surviving leadership cadre, is big business these days. You can buy T-shirts with the East German state symbol and 'DDR', for £20 a pop. Some entrepreneur has made a trademark of the DDR coat of arms and is no doubt making a mint from what is blatantly not his/her property. A trip to e-bay reveals half a dozen 'Trabant' T-shirt options retailing at £12-£15. Personally, i have spurned the over-mined seam of T-Shirt irony in favour of an electric blue DDR tracksuit top, from the 1974 Wiorld Cup era (famously, the DDR beat West Germany 1-0 in their own backyard in the 1974 World Cup finals). I'm not going to be wasting my time cultivating a Marxist-Leninist bowl cut to go with it, though.

Much newspaper ink has been spilled on the subject since 1990-91, with DDR writing and cinema a steadily increasing genre over the years. perhaps the most memorable writings on the subject are Anna Funder's Stasiland, where she tracks down and questions former agents of the Stasi, through Neal Ascherson's account of his being monitored by the feared DDR security police.

Mention of the Stasi makes the whole phenomenon of Ostalgie appear absurdly misguided and not a little sinister. However the danger is that one over concentrates on the bad aspects of the DDR, and there were many, and forget that many people, as with everywhere, got on with their very ordinary lives, trying to look after themselves and their families, without really coming across the SED/MfS too much.

It is the ordinariness of life in the former DDR that is the subject of Goodbye Lenin!, the beautiful little comedy directed by Wolfgang Becker, and, in box office terms, the most successful film ever made about life in the former communist state, and the consequences of its' collapse for ordinary people. The film tells the story of Alex, a teenager in 1989, and his mother, a fiercely idealistic Communist committed to the DDR with all its faults.

Alex's mother has a heart attack on the night of 7 October 1989, having seen her son arrested by the Stasi for participating in a pro-democracy march. That night was a very tense one in the DDR, as Erich Honecker, the country's political leader, was in favour of Tienanmen Square style repression of the burgeoning pro-democracy movement. Alex's mother stays in a coma throughout the collapse of the DDR, as its state apparatus, in the memorable words of one commentator, 'simply melted away'.

Alex's mother recovers, but the doctors advise her children that all shocks and upsets must be avoided, in order to avoid a second, fatal, heart attack. As a result, Alex and his sister Ariane have to re-create the DDR in their home, and maintain the fiction that the country still meaningfully exists, even in the headlong rush to re-unification. This leads to a mixture of truly hilarious passages (such as the re-creation of DDR news bulletins by Alex's wannabe film director work colleague, Denis), and moments of tragedy, such as the children's rediscovery of their estranged father, who escaped the DDR, and the reduction of East Germany's first cosmonaut to the status of lowly taxi driver.

I heartily recommend this film. It treats the subject of the DDR very sensitively, pointing out its ugly side whilst making a plea for some of its more positive values to be taken forward ion post-unification Germany. At the end of the film, Alex admits that the DDR he invents for his dying mother is perhaps the one he would have wished to have lived in; the implication is that this positive vision of a truly free, humane, left leaning country, is the vision of a unified Germany that the director wishes to see develop.

And there's something for DDR car fans, too; Trabants and Wartburgs appear throughout the film, and a joke is made about the length of time it took to wait for one's car to be delivered. Alex's mother is astonished that their 'himmelblau' Trabant Kombi only took three years to materialise....

To find out more about the film, check out the links to the right of this post. I've just finished reading Paul Cooke's cultural history, Representing East Germany since Unification He looks at Goodbye, Lenin! and the sadly unavailable-in-the-UK Sonnenallee in some detail. He makes the argument that Ostalige is, in part, an attempt to reclaim the 'ordinariness' of life in the DDR from the stereotypical narrative of 'Bad Stasi' versus 'Good Dissidents' that had characterised previous films.

Cooke is also good enough to rip to shreads the truly appalling Go Trabi Go!, made in the early 90s, a kind of desperately unfunny Herbie goes Bananas with a Trabant instead of a VW Beetle.

Ian Paisley's Trabant?

2006-03-05T15:02:00.000Z

The World's Most Disastrously Positioned Ashtray

2006-03-05T14:38:00.001Z

Despite the snow, managed to get out for a short hop yesterday. The Trabant actually handles really well in the snow- it was like tarmac, to be honest. It was amusing to see souped-up computerised cars and Mondeo men slipping and sliding about on some nasty hard, icy snow, whilst the plastic dart swept past untroubled.

For the first time, though, I noticed how catastrophically the main ashtray is positioned- in the middle of the dashboard (top right of photo, just under steering wheel). It's been some time since I finally managed to shake off a bad addiction to Marlboro Lights, but it would be a dangerous thing to be a simultaneous smoker and Trabant driver.

The right hand is important in the Trabant, as it needs to be on the gears virtually constantly (the gears are the little lever just out of the picture, behind the steering wheel). So, even leaving aside the transfer of fag to mouth, when the ash gets beyond manageable, one's choice is to ash all over the floor of the car, or leave the gearbox in bits all over the road because one missed a crucial change, whilst ashing in the tray.

One can tell it is a car designed in a pre-1962 era; there are ashtrays everywhere in the interior, I wouldn't be surprised if there was one inside the petrol tank.

Next the fragment of speedometer visible is the stunningly pointless "fuel econometer" (see posts passim.) which the DDR car making collective thought more valuable than a fuel gauge. Expatriate Scots will also become misty eyed and nostalgic at the sight of the bottle of Irn Bru to the bottom right of the photo.

Snow!

2006-03-03T10:22:00.000Z

http://www.derkleinegarten.de
It's been snowing like Billy-O in Angus this week, with a total white out experienced by many. So bad was it, that trains had to be dug out of deep snow drifts at Laurencekirk, just nine miles north of where I live.

Nonetheless Heather has persevered with her driving. We won't say too much about her pranging her Dad's car (nothing serious), but she has been out in the Trabant, too. Apparently it handles quite well in the snow, which is something of a relief, and she has been finding the gears easier. Phew.

The car currently sits in the driveway in St. Cyrus with a large cover on it, like one of those Shetland ponies you see wearing a coat in the fields. The snow is knee deep out where she lives. Driving and reversing practice is likely to be restricted this weekend. :(

Why a Trabant?

2006-02-27T19:50:00.000Z

Well, it is a reasonable question, and one to which there is no easy answer.

When I a small boy, I was absolutely obsessed by cars. I could tell a Sunbeam Stiletto from a Hillman Imp from 100 yards. I knew that Austin Allegros and Morris Marinas were rubbish, and anything West German or Swedish were good.

As well as the usual small-boy things of going to motor shows at the Kelvin Hall with my Dad, and pestering him to stop at any new car garage when we passed it, I also developed a fascination (for some unknown reason) with cars from the then Eastern bloc. Whereas most small boys want a Ferrari or Lamborghini, I wanted a Wartburg.

Such it was that when a new Skoda dealership opened up not too far from where we lived, a salesman, the creases in his nylon trousers creaking (it was the late seventies, mind), came round with an armful of glossy new brochures from Czechoslovakia for "my Dad." Had the poor bloke realised that the brochures would be cut to shreds and all the pictures of the cars stuck into my scrapbook as soon as his back was turned, he wouldn't have bothered.

What can I say? Both my sister and I have always been attracted to lost causes, or had a visceral sympathy for the underdog or the neglected. In my case, that means following poor third division football teams, and, as I get older, increasingly voting for parties that never retain their deposit at elections. If Moldova are playing the USA at ice hockey, I'll cheer instinctively for Moldova, even though I know next to nothing about the place and have no interest in ice hockey.

It was generally assumed that I would be battering down the door of the Post Office for my provisional licence application as soon as I turned 17, but it never quite happened. As I grew up, I lost interest in cars and driving altogether. Were I a laconic bullshitter, I would claim that my interest in cars was replaced by an interest in girls and recreational drugs, but the more mundane truth is that I became a bit of a sports fanatic and started following football and cricket obsessively. That's a story too dull for even me to tell though.

Around this time, the Berlin Wall crumbled and the whole Soviet satellite system collapsed. Being always a fascinated student of politics and history, I watched these developments from September-December 1989 with open mouthed amazement. It's easy to forget now how permanent that division of Europe seemed, and how I was amongst the last generation of children to grow up with a very faint but lingering fear of nuclear conflict with evil people called Communists.

A by product of these seismic, epoch ending developments was the re-branding of the Trabant as a "cool" collector's item, much like the Soviet militaria and badges that were being given away for next to nothing at market stalls across Eastern Europe. Several hundred trickled over here from about 1990-95, with the first few exempted from traditional import duties by laughing British customs officers. Sadly, many of them were simply left to rot, or scrapped, once the novelty value had worn off, as, for the uninitiated, Trabis can be tricky to look after and drive.

The other personal thing that mitigated against me ever learning to drive was that I always lived in a place where it wasn't necessary. Over the last fifteen years, I have lived in: St. Andrews (everywhere walkable within 15 minutes), London (well, there's the Tube, and driving looks like no fun at all there), Cambridge (bicycling capital of the UK), Cardiff (lived near the centre, no point having a car), Newport (ditto), and Montrose (2 minutes from railway station; everywhere else within 15 minute walk).

So it wasn't until recently, when I met Heather, who was learning to drive, that I turned my mind to cars again. I live in a semi-rural area and have friends who are only really reachable by taxi or car. And, frankly, it was beginning to be a little embarrassing that I couldn't drive myself and had to rely on lifts from others when driving was a necessity.

I had a look on the 'net for cars for sale, having it in mind to purchase a Wartburg, my old friend from childhood. Alas, the closest I came to that was buying a Wartburg fridge magnet from e-bay. Although Wartburgs were sold in the UK for a time in the 70s, (they were always bright orange, from memory), they are very rare now. Verdicts on the Wartburg on the internet are far from complimentary in the main, with the sad summary from the AUTOSOVIET site (link to the right) that, whilst the Trabi has become a cultural symbol of the old DDR and its disappearance in 1989, the Wartburg has been reduced to the status of "industrial junk". Channel 4 did a programme on "Cold War Clunkers" and claimed the Wartburg was also unsafe in wet weather, and burned fuel as though it were limitless. The unsafe claim is bilge, but hey ho. Wartburg weren't around to sue Channel 4 anymore.

Trabants were more numerous and still the subject of media stories. Last year, the little machines were national news for a few days, when a Derbyshire collector was ordered to remove his 50+ Trabants from the Peak District national park. Then there was an (entirely false) media tale that both Wartburgs and Trabants had been banned by the EU for, well, being horrendously environmentally unfriendly and rubbish. Few cars have been the subject of more myth and half truth than the poor old Trabi.

So, I ended up buying a Trabi, because it's unusual, has an interesting history, is eye catching, and I suppose because of my passion for the unfashionable and the underdog. Even though I've only driven it a few yards, it's not a decision I'm regretting so far. the next big step is a road trip once my licence comes through- and those of you still awake after that lengthy exegesis will no doubt want to tune back in a couple of weeks time, to see how it went.

You can Have any Colour You Like, so Long as it's Pastel

2006-02-27T19:26:00.000Z

The last fortnight

2006-02-27T19:06:00.000Z

Right, it's high time that I updated this here website.

My Valentine's meal out was very nice thanks for asking, and the Trabi puttered there and back quite happily, once we got it going. (Another push start and dousing in a dense cloud of blue oily smoke was required).

I'm still waiting for my provisional license to come through, so irritatingly am reduced to practising reversing in the driveway of the house where the car lives. Heather, being a more efficient sort than me, has however been out in it a couple of times with her Dad. She confesses to finding the gears "a bitty difficult" and has been eyeing Nissans longingly in the second hand car pages. She likes it, though, and is struggling on. I actually have an advantage over her, in that I've never driven a 'real' car, whereas sahe has, and the transition is a difficult one to make. The chap from Lincoln said that "If you can drive one of these, you can drive anything", so I shall persevere and actually am finding the delay in being allowed to drive really frustrating.

The Trabant is terrific fun, though, and folk love it. Reactions locally to it have ranged from hysterical laughter through intrigue to genuine puzzlement, and one or two questions along the lines of "Why on earth did you buy this?" Generally, people find it interesting, and children like it, because it's small and red, and they think it is Noddy's car.

Once I've got it running and I've passed my test (5-Year-Plan Target: Test to be Passed by the End of July), we'll see what it's limits are. Heather's Dad went a bit pale when I announced my intention to drive it to Glasgow to visit my parents in the summer. He doesn't think it will make it that far, and expects other drivers to be driven to distraction by being stuck behind it on the motorway. I'm going to be giving it a shot, though.

My license should turn up some time in March, and after a busy period at work ends I intend to be out and about a lot in it in April. Driving seems to be so much about confidence- even moving forward at 5 mph in the driveway, with no obstacles in sight, engenders a cold panic in the pit of my stomach at the moment. Hopefully that will ease with time.

Insurance Misery

2006-02-14T15:34:00.000Z

Well, the Trabi is a cheap car, but insurance sure as hell ain't. :(

Half a day's worth of excruciatingly tedious phonecalls this weekend revealed that only Norwich Union, of every single major car insurer, are prepared to underwrite the machine, at a truly astronomical £1613 per annum.

This is because:

1. I am a diabetic
2. Both Heather and I have provisional licenses only
3. There aren't many Trabants in the UK
4. The car is an import
5. the car is a left hand drive.

So, effectively, we are insuring the car for twice the sum I paid for it.

At least we can drive it legally now though.

:(

St. Cyrus debut

2006-02-08T10:09:00.000Z

With insurance and road tax still "in process", the Trabi made a maiden voyage last night under cover of darkness, with Heather's Dad at the wheel.

Work and time incompatibility meant that the car had been idle since it's marathon journey last week, so the battery was as flat as a novice baker's first attempt at a loaf of bread. Fortunately, the machine is so light that it could be push-started, grunting into life in such a pall of oily smoke that the neighbours came running out of their front doors, to see which juvenile reprobate had thrown a smoke grenade.

The major breakthrough last night was actually getting fourth gear to work. The Trabi's fourth gear is a "freewheel" gear for going down hills. There are two problems; when the gearbox is cold, it won't engage at all; even when the car is warmed up, it requires a little bit of coaxing and persuasion to usher it into top gear. So, until the Trabi had stopped shivering in the cold of an Angus night, we were obliged to spin round in third, which means a maximum speed of 40 mph. Heading downhill, and with the otherwise useless "fuel-econometer" showing two amber warning bars, the mechanism finally clicked, and we reached the dizzying heights of 55mph on the flat for a few seconds.

It's a wonderful car. The noise made as the gears are changed is akin to the noise made by a hairdryer, just before it blows up. It's next major outing will be to Forfar next Tuesday, where we are all heading for an en-famille Valentine's meal with Heather's Mum & Dad, sister & husband. Before then I need to:

1. Convince an insurance broker that there is actually a car called a Trabant, that I do actually own one and am not an eccentric drifted in off the street to waste their time, no I haven't wrapped a souped up Vauxhall Corsa round a lamp-post in Merthyr Tydfil recently, and purchase insurance for the four of us;

2. Road Tax it; the period of grace for the excuse "Oh I've just bought it and I'm off down the Post Office now constable" is about to run out

3. Fill it up, testing my cherished O-Level Arithmetic skills to the full with the 50:1 petrol/2-stroke oil formula.

I almost had a heart attack, last night, though, as for some reason I had it in my head that the Trabi runs on leaded fuel and leaded fuel alone. A brief vox pop round Montrose garages showed that lead fuel is now unobtainable, and the ghastly prospect of having to drive to the badlands of Smokie-ville down the road just to fill the tank up loomed with grim intensity. However, I have been informed this morning, by my Lincoln correspondent, that the car runs on ordinary unleaded. The gale of relief that swept through me could power HMS Victory all the way to the Cape of Good Hope.

Here it is!

2006-02-02T09:12:00.000Z

The Trabi puttered into Montrose yesterday and the formalities were completed. I didn't manage to arrange an aerobatic fly past by ex pilots of the East German air force, but it was a momentous occasion nonetheless.

The chap from Lincoln turned up around half eleven and I bundled into the thing to be schooled in its caprices. Sitting at the wheel of a Trabi is rather like sitting in the cockpit of a Soviet bi-plane. You have to go through a 'pre-flight' list of turning on the petrol, choke, etc, and the gears are like an aircraft's throttle. They are mounted on the steering column and are totally different to a Western car's gears (in the process making a more effective immobiliser than anything that the 'security experts' of the capitalist countries can come up with.) If you can imagine a small car controlled by motorbike controls, that's kind of close to a Trabi experience.

It is surprisingly nippy. It's tiny, and weighs little more than your average envelope and sheet of writing paper, so even with an engine little bigger than a sewing machine, it really zips along. It also has a strange 'freewheeling' fourth gear for going downhill, quite different to the fourth gear you may be used to on the motorway. Despite the libraries full of rude jokes about the Trabant, it isn't too noisy, and doesn't trail a voluminous cloud of blue smoke behind it. You don't have to be arsed with oil & water changes, as there isn't any in the engine, and the only electrics are the spark plugs and battery.

I don't know if any of you were devotees of the 1940s series Rocket Man, but those of you who were will remember a bizarre figure who flew through the air at supersonic speeds, wearing a Norman infantryman's helmet, powered by little more than a Scalextric controller. The car's heater is a little bit like that, three knobs sticking out of a silver box under the dashboard, but as the heat comes in off the engine, it works pretty well.

The only bind is that it will be six months before I can drive it regularly, as I'm at the very early stages of learning. However, the Trabi will be kept fed and watered by people who have a license already, even if I will have to sit with them and change the fiendish gears (gulp). I will also have to get used to the petrol/oil mix that it runs on. If you fill a Trabi with petrol alone and drive it away, it will grind to a halt, the engine irrepairably seized, within 300 yards.

The people we bought it from were sad to leave it behind, as it had been their chariot on many a European holiday. We loved the car on sight though so hopefully we'll have as much fun with it. The thing we're going to have to get used to is the stares. As the Trabi hirpled down the High Street yesterday afternoon, people stopped in slack jawed astonishment. A man stood and just watched as I started the thing up yesterday, an amused half smile playing across his face. Given the internet presence of the Trabant, I thought that there were a lot more in the yoo-kay than there actually are; apparently, there's only around 200 of them here, and fewer than a dozen in Scotland.

Check back again soon for more....

A potted history of the Trabi, & Zwickau

2006-01-30T23:18:00.000Z

Trabant 1.1s for export, shortly before the Zwickau factory was bought by VW, and started making the 'Polo'. Source: Allan Tannenbaum, http://www.sohoblues.com/hotbizpix/default.htm

The Trabant used to be made in Zwickau, a large town of 100,000 in the far south east of Germany, near to the border with the Czech Republic. Before World War 2, this place churned out the Horch, an elegant family of passenger saloons and sports cars.

After the war, the factory continued to turn out these 1930s cars for a few more years, until their estranged owners in the Bundesrepublik protested, and forced design and name changes. The DDRs other car factory, in Eisenach in North-East Germany, was a confiscated premises owned by BMW. When BMW complained about the re-badged 1930s cars produced there, the factory simply was renamed 'EMW' and began to roll out the Wartburg. The Socialist Unity Party intervened to insist that the cars made in East Germany should be simpler, less complicated, easy to maintain, and have a long life.

The Trabi's immediate parent from the mid-late 50s was the Trabant P50, which grew out of very austere post-war conditions. To put it in context, Germany- East and West- was a scarred, pitted, devastated ruin in 1945, and in the Communist-controlled zone, the first Five Year economic plan made no allowance for consumer goods, as the country required to be rebuilt first. In the mid 1950s, with things like the Isetta and Messerscmitt bubble cars emerging in the West, the Zwickau factory turned to building a small run about. The Trabant I have- the P601- started to be built in the 1960s, and continued in production, with only a few minor alterations, until 1991.

The Trabant wasn't really available in the West, despite a few half hearted export attempts to the Low Countries, France, and South Africa. However, they became ubiquitous in Eastern Europe, particualrly in Hungary, where they were sold as the Merkur. Recently, the Hungarian government has run a poster campaign aimed at persuading their citizens to give up their Trabis and take to public transport; the response has been muted to say the least, as the little cars are still very popular there, and widely used.

In the last years of the make, the DDR signed a licensing agreement with VW, to build their Volkswagen Polo engine. The last 18 months of Trabant production saw the cars fitted with this far superior engine, which almost double the car's performance. However, the last Trabant '1.1' models, as they were known, are widely held not to be 'real Trabants' by collectors, as the experience of this car is totally different.

With the collapse of the SED and the DDR in November 1989, when Gorbachev refused to intervene with Soviet troops to quell street protests and the flight of DDR-burger to the West, via Hungary and Austria, so too the market for the Trabi collapsed. With access to Western car showrooms, and with a generous exchange rate of one Ostmark for one Bundesmark, the cars were scrapped or abandoned by the thousand. Although the new Trabant 1.1 was held to be more reliable and better equipped, no one wanted them anymore. It was inevitable, therefore, that the Zwickau factory closed in mid 1991. It was bought by VW and now makes component parts for their range of vehicles, employing under half of the workforce that made the Trabant.

The Trabi still lives on as a symbol of Zwickau, though, as recently acknowledged by the mayor of the town. In a strange conclusion (or is it a new beginning?) to the Trabant story, a group of US venture capitalists are rumoured to have bought the intellectual copyright of the brand from VW for a nominal sum, and allegedly have plans to build Trabants in Uzbekistan, as a cheap run about for the people of that country. Whether this is true, or just an expensive piss-take, only time will tell.

Want a more detailed history of Zwickau & the Trabi? Check this link....

Trabant Poster, September 1989

2006-01-29T21:18:00.000Z

Translation: "The Little Car with a Big Future". No trace of irony there, either.

Welcome to the Trabant Driver!

2006-01-29T20:00:00.000Z

A warm welcome to The Trabant Driver!.

I am a relatively late-learner driver. To the extreme consternation, not to say outright ridicule, of friends I have bought an old East German Trabant as my chariot of choice, to learn in.

Few cars have such a place in history as the 'Trabi'. In the old DDR, they were one of only two cars that people could order, and the waiting list for one's new set of wheels was anything between 6-18 years. Of course if one had the, er, good fortune to be in the Stasi or be a leading cheap suit in the local branch of the ruling SED (Sozialistische Einheitspartei Deutschlands, or Socialist Unity Party of Germany), one could leapfrog one's way up the list, but the ordinary punter had years of public transport to endure before the true joy of owning der Kleine Stinker became possible.

I well remember when the Berlin Wall came down, that the 'Trabi' was held up as a leitmotif of the absurdities and inefficeincies of state socialism. Rumours abounded that the car was made variously of cardboard, paper-mache, recycled vegetable pulp, etc. It can only go about 70 miles and hour with a strong tailwind behind it. It's engine is tiny, only has five moving parts, and has all the power and menace of a toothless Chihuahua.

Famously, U2 suspended four or five Trabants that they had bought above their stage when they vaingloriously toured the ex-Communist bloc in 1990-1. The pompous, deluded and utterly irony-free stadium rockers may, in small part, have contributed to the first twitchings of Ostalgie, as folk began to realise that their 'liberation' consisted of immediate unemployment, and the opportunity to be patronised by four middle class Irishmen replete with pretentious lower-sixth lyrics and bad haircuts to match, at 40 DMs a ticket.

Since those heady days the Trabi has steadily disappeared from the roads of Central and Eastern Europe. Even in death, these little machines are murderously unfriendly to the environment. Trabis are made from a weird fibrous resin charmingly entitled Duraplast which is virtually impossible to break down and dispose of. I read an article recently about a Belgian car breaker whose idea of a nightmare day, is a day trying to break up worn out Trabis and Wartburgs.

No matter how bad the car was rumoured to be, however, clubs of enthusiasts formed in the West, where they were unobtainable before 1989. I have bought my car from a collector and devotee in Lincolnshire, who has driven the Trabi all over Europe without a hitch. This chap swears by the Trabant as a cheap, efficient and utterly indestructible run about. He's driving the car to where I live in North East Scotland on Wednesday, and I shall be schooled in all its' eccentricities before he heads back down south.

According to a German tourism website, decent Trabis now fetch around 5,000 euros in Germany, despite the fact that owners couldn't give them away in the early 90s. Indeed many, like flats in East Berlin, were simply abandoned as the old DDR collapsed, and its citizens sought a new Western consumerist lifestyle.

Anyway, I'll be keeping you posted on this blog about learning to drive, and the character of the bizarre little four wheeled creature which is about to be mine.