LITMIR.BIZ

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there is something about the very marque, Alfa, that makes the seminal vesicles writhe like a bag of ferrets. From the age of eight, when I made a model of some vintage machine, I have known that it stood for Anonima Lombarda Fabbrica Automobili. That great factory on the Padan plain where hatchet-faced Italians tune, tune and tune the engines they love until they burble, like the cooing of sucking-doves outside your bedroom on a Tuscan hilltop as the morning sun strikes the honey-hued stone; or like the blib blib blib of Lavazza coffee gently ejaculating through the nozzle of an espresso machine. And it was then, no doubt, that I conceived my passion for the cars that have ruled my life.

      There was the beautiful, red 33 Quadrifoglio 1.5, which went like a bomb until the left-hand headlamp connected with a meat-pie van on a Cornish B-road at 1am and the elegant rectangle of the chassis became a parallelogram. There was the silver GTV, whose porous engine block produced such a pall of brown smoke that you couldn’t see out of the rear and Dutch police would arrest you for violating EU emission rules.

      Finally there was the gorgeous, high, square-rumped Alfa 90 2.5 V6 injectioné: the kind of car in which Mafia dons were conveyed to meet Giulio Andreotti or Bettino Craxi in the good old days when the rust welled up beneath the paintwork of the Alfas like the great bubo of corruption beneath the skin of Italian politics.

      As I think of that leal and trusty steed, I get all choked up remembering the day it died beneath me of a burst aorta on my way up the M1 to address a group of Tory activists in Llangollen. I was then forced to commandeer a taxi from Luton to North Wales at the cost of an average family holiday, arriving around 9pm to find my audience mutinous and pie-eyed on wine and cheese.

      Seething, therefore, with those compound humiliations, I sought a kind of revenge in this the latest and most gizmo-encrusted Alfa 156 2-litre T Spark saloon; and you could feel the life-giving, baby’s-brain-enhancing lead-free petrol surging hormonally into the cylinders, or possibly the carburettor, or wherever it’s meant to surge. And soon that blonde was right back in front of my gorgeous, gouged-out snout, which looks a bit like a halloween lantern with a harelip.

      And now we were coming into the Box Hill death run, where bonkers bikers yowl up and down from dawn till dusk on the dual carriageway. On any other day I would be tensed, white-knuckled in the slow lane, but today we were both giving those motorcyclists the humiliation they deserve, carving up the Kawasakis, and arum arum arum araaaagh, she took one and I took him too, our exhausts breathing contemptuously into his astonished face. Then we took another, and araaagh went the Alfa with the bubbling moan of lava in some volcanic pool of Etna, and now there was a clear stretch.

      Whether this blonde knew she’d been

       engaged in a test of a man’s waning

       virility, I neither know nor care.

      It was her or me. There was no excuse. There was no competition, not when the Selespeed contraption ensures that the interval in which you can move from third to fourth is tinier than the interval between a traffic light turning green on the Via Veneto and the man in the Fiat behind parping his horn, slapping on his door and shouting at you to move. Whether she saw me I do not know; and whether this blonde was aware that she had been engaged in a test of a man’s waning virility I neither know nor care.

      But I tell you this. My Alfa took her from behind, and I fairly thrummed it down into Dorking—‘Now you’re Dorking,’ I congratulated myself. And by making use of the high double-wishbone suspension system I was able to make a kind of genuflection to the speed limits, then round the cyclotronic roundabouts, and ho for Horsham and victory…Or so it should have been.

      Perhaps it was complacency; perhaps I just forgot to look in the mirror. Whatever it was, we came to a roundabout a couple of miles later, and—testa di cazzo!—there she was, up there on my right shoulder as we came into the ring. She had the drop on me. She was pulling away and plick my thumb twitched reflexively on the Selespeed button to bring the engine down into first and turn the car into a monstrous uncorseted roaring of kinetic energy…

      And plick I clicked again, plick plick plick and—stronzo figlio di cazzo!—the sodding thing stayed in second and there we were, wallowing on that roundabout, with as much élan as a piked porpoise. And as the tears started from my eyes, suburban Beemers flashed and honked, and her rump wiggled away for the last time…

      Perhaps I might have caught up with her eventually, except that just then, without warning, my five-year-old child vomited all over the back seat, including the magnesium structure and submarining beam. Next time, give me a gear stick.

       Vital statistics

      Engine 2-litre, 16V Top Speed 134mph Acceleration 0–60mph in 8.6 secs Mpg 33.2 Price (1999) £21,993

       INHUMAN TRAFFIC

      The war is over. Now all you have to

       do is get out of Kosovo in a Fiat Uno,

       without attracting the attention of the

       retreating Serb forces.

      ‘OK Vuk,’ I said to the cream-faced Serb as we nosed out of Pristina into bandit country, leaving the last Irish Guards Scimitar in the rear-view mirror of our Uno. ‘Let’s get the Vuk out of here.’

      And let me tell you, that gibbering Serb needed no encouragement from me. Vuk was 29, with a head that tapered like an anvil from his rippling thorax. If I understood him correctly, he’d narrowly missed selection for the all-Serbia basketball team.

      He could run a hundred metres in slightly over ten seconds. He didn’t smoke. He drank nothing except Coca-Cola, to which he attributed properties of a barely credible order. Vuk was the kind of clean-living, God-fearing Serb that Arkan, the war criminal, used to recruit to his Tiger militia. In fact, it seemed Arkan had tried it on just the other day, at some rural wedding. When someone called Vuk a ‘Serb maniac’, he was delighted, flexing his muscles for days and saying, ‘I am Serb maniac.’

      Except that at this particular moment he was Vuk Funkovic, banjaxed with the terror of a man who knows that his people have done something very nasty, for a long time, to some other people…

      …But those other people had now got the upper hand, they’d got their AK-47s, and they were swarming all over the northern suburbs of Pristina, setting up illegal checkpoints on this dusty winding road, and winkling the fugitive Serbs from their Yugos and popping them like cringing molluscs; and there were 40 kilometres between us and the relative sanctuary of Serbia.

      Which is why he was pedalling that throttle fortissimo and why, as I looked at the windows of his maroon Fiat Uno Testadicazzo 1.4 with bodywork about as bullet-resistant as a can of Diet Fanta, I said a little prayer.

      Call me a sissy. Call me a wimp. But I felt the faintest frisson of apprehension to be driving through the retreating Serb army, past soldiers drunk on Slivovitz and hatred of Nato, when they had just shot three journalists on the suspicion (well-grounded, it turned out) that they were German.

      As for Vuk: Vuk was normally brave. On the morning Nato came in from Skopje, and the other Serb drivers were cowering in the lobby of the glorified ashtray that is Pristina’s Grand Hotel, saying ‘I not go’, it was Vuk who took me and Ivana, my gorgeous clean-living interpreter, down south to see the joyeuse entrée of the Gurkhas at the Kacanik pass.

      Vuk had the guts to get out of the Uno and stand with me by the first mass grave the Paras found in Kosovo. He gulped but stood his ground when the black-bereted Albanian guerrilla appeared and started explaining how beneath the 89 numbered stakes where the flies buzzed, were the families that had been put in a tunnel, grenaded, and shot—shot by Serbs like Vuk.

      He didn’t mind when we flagged down a lurching Merc-ful of KLA, wizened gaffers in brown and yellow fatigues who flashed their gums and waved their Kalashnikovs like rattles. Neither Vuk nor

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