Trouble and strife with the trouble and strife

By Martin Port

| 7 Jan 2013

Wife's diary entry:

Tonight, I thought my husband was acting weird. We had made plans to meet at a nice restaurant for dinner. I was shopping with my friends all day long, so I thought he was upset at the fact that I was a bit late, but he made no comment on it. Conversation wasn't flowing, so I suggested that we go somewhere quiet so we could talk. He agreed, but he didn't say much.

I asked him what was wrong. He said: "Nothing." I asked him if it was my fault that he was upset. He said he wasn't upset, that it had nothing to do with me, and not to worry about it. On the way home, I told him that I loved him. He smiled slightly, and kept driving.

I can't explain his behavior I don't know why he didn't say: "I love you, too." When we got home, I felt as if I had lost him completely, as if he wanted nothing to do with me anymore. He just sat there quietly and watched TV. He continued to seem distant and absent. Finally, with silence all around us, I decided to go to bed. About 15 minutes later, he came to bed. But I still felt that he was distracted and his thoughts were somewhere else. He fell asleep, I cried. I don't know what to do. I'm almost sure that his thoughts are with someone else. My life is a disaster.

Husband's diary entry:

Scimitar wouldn't start, can't figure it out.

Last night I actually plucked up enough courage to show my wife this and thankfully she did laugh. Had I shown it to her a couple of days before, I think I may well have found myself wearing the ice cream maker we were bought for Christmas.

You see, I’d held off from trying to fix a slightly irritating hesitation that was occurring at a particular point in the Scimitar’s rev range, and finally found time to spare the day before New Year’s Eve. “It’ll only take an hour,” I had suggested, but by the time my wife returned nearly two hours later, I was still at it and wearing a face like thunder.

Changing the part to try and solve the problem had been relatively simple. The fact that the car wouldn’t start afterwards was the cause of my temporary ‘black dog’, and although she tried to be sympathetic – even placing a reassuring hand on my back as she quickly ushered our youngest into the house – there was little that could help, bar that magical combination of fuel, air and spark of course.

The rest of the day went by, punctuated with frequent "I’m just popping out to try something…" visits to the car, frantic searches on the internet in the hope that I would hit upon the obvious solution, plus lots of door slamming during which I realised that glassfibre doesn’t sound as good as aging steel.

That night I went to bed frustrated. Frustrated that I had failed to get the car started. Frustrated that I had been unable to test my ‘cure’. Frustrated that I owned a car that could develop new faults all by itself. Frustrated that I couldn’t hide my frustration.

Then at 7.30am the next morning, inspiration hit me. Inspiration and just a tinge of embarrassment. It occurred to me that while I had put the contents of the distributor cap back after changing the vacuum advance unit, the ‘chopper’ part of the electronic ignition set-up had been replaced with ‘gay abandon’ rather than any precision.

Creeping outside while everyone else still slept, the Eureka moment came when I noticed that the ‘chopper’ had indeed been put back in completely the wrong place. A slight rotation later and the car fired up.

Oddly, I was in a much better mood from that point onwards – so much so that I was able to chuckle heartedly when someone posted the above scenario on the Scimitar Owner’s Club forum.

Thankfully, so did my wife… kind of!

Martin Port

Martin Port is a contributor to Classic & Sports Car and served as Art Editor for many years. He is a noted expert on Land-Rovers

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