Confinement in Mallorca

Life in the time now known as BC at The Boat House weekly meeting. | Max Gennel

Robert KlevenhagenPalma22/04/2020 16:50

One of the effectsof this lockdown is that we’re not allowed to see my mum. Not in the real sense. She won’t mind me telling you that she’s some way past the point where vanity dictates that age is a secret, so she likes to see us every now and then. She’s also geographically not very far away but may as well be on the other side of the world. So what happens when her phone says that that she’s used up 4.9 gigs of her 5 gig memory? And if she does nothing about it her photos will start to disappear from her phone. Simple you say, just upgrade for another 50 gigs. However the first rule of life is that nothing is simple.

Five FaceTime calls and two hours later we’ve done it. But I feel like I’ve driven the whole route of the Paris Dakar desert rally in a Lotus 7 wearing a blindfold whilst changing gear and steering using a pair of disposable chopsticks. But I won the event. Jane my better half, a helpful spectator, said she needed a glass of wine. And on the plus side, we are over two hours nearer the end of the lockdown. Such are the joys of confinement.
Another few happy hours went by in a flurry of pings last Wednesday evening at our weekly virtual Car Meetup at The Boat House in Palma on WhatsApp. You’d expect that after the first meeting interest would drop off a bit. Certainly not, late afternoon a short video sequence arrived. It was the chief honcho of the American Car Club doing a burnout in his Pontiac Trans Am, the caption said ‘I’m here’. We noticed I think. The burnout wasn’t in his lounge as prescribed by the current confinement rules in Spain, so we can only assume that it was filmed in the time now known as BC. I’ll let you guess what that stands for.

What was interesting at last week’s virtual event was the surfacing of current and past projects plus other noteworthy vehicles people have knocking around. For example, the original pic of a Mustang which is now restored and painted blue, it was orange originally. The question posed by the owner was, should he have changed the colour from the original? What do you think? Or another project, I think a 1955 Land Rover. You’ll see that it’s one of those in ’need of a bit of TLC’ jobs. And while we’re on off road stuff, how about this Jeep, is it a full size? Or a scale version. Great toy whichever it is.

So we’re all coping with confinement by connecting online. And probably because of the diversion and connectivity, coping better. Can you imagine what we’d have done without the internet? Probably best not to think about that possibility at all. On that jolly note I’ll say goodbye for now and hope to see you all in the virtual next week.