PH v Dadsnet. Pour your heart out here according to The Time
Discussion
Good article on PH in the Sat Times mag today.
According to the article we men choose PH to help mend broken hearts, choose baby buggies and even discuss depression!
Well Im saddened by that. Just off to walk the infant round the park now, on my own since the OH left me!
According to the article we men choose PH to help mend broken hearts, choose baby buggies and even discuss depression!
Well Im saddened by that. Just off to walk the infant round the park now, on my own since the OH left me!
Edited by gemini on Saturday 29th November 11:48
Link for folks: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/magazine/article4277...
Edit: Ugh forgot about the paywall
Edit: Ugh forgot about the paywall
Mannginger said:
Link for folks: http://www.thetimes.co.uk/tto/magazine/article4277...
Edit: Ugh forgot about the paywall
Copy and paste!Edit: Ugh forgot about the paywall
It has 5 million members and 10,000 posts a day – and its discussions cover everything from depression, diets and fast cars to body hair and babies
It’s 7am on Sunday and I am standing with several hundred men I’ve never met before in Fleet Services on the M3. The car park is packed with the flash vehicles that have ferried us here – Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Porsches and the like. The supercars are being lashed by torrential rain, hail and gales, which are forecast to intensify during the day. Meanwhile, indoors, patience is being severely tested by an overwhelmed Starbucks concession.
Having woken at 3.40am to be here, I can barely speak with tiredness. It is possible the men I’m with feel the same; they’re just as mute, with one behind me silently posting photographs of his own car onto his Instagram account, and one in front of me using the short break from driving to play Crazy Taxi on his iPad. The sound of someone actually saying something startles us all.
“Bloody hell, a GT-R.”
Everyone looks round and it turns out the exclamation is a rhetorical one, made in response to the arrival of a Japanese car that has just pulled up next to the Times photographer’s 12-year-old Mercedes E320 CDI, which, with its dodgy ABS and tendency to emit a puff of black smoke on acceleration and braking, has been proving rather an embarrassment all morning. The speaker continues, nodding to himself in disbelief, as if hit suddenly by the size of the public sector borrowing deficit or by a woeful revelation about the situation in Iraq.
“Five hundred pounds for an oil change.”
There is a long pause and an even longer wait for coffee. Eventually, still seemingly in a state of shock, he puts on his cagoule, walks out, gets into his own sports car and, along with tens of others, drives off westwards, to repeat the scene in another car park in another part of the country.
What am I doing hanging out at such an ungodly hour with these monosyllabic men? I am participating in 2014’s Wilton Classic and Supercar show. To be more specific, I am with the contingent from the PistonHeads website, riding in the supercar parade from Weybridge to Salisbury in an Audi R8 with James Drake, one of the website’s executives. It’s to gain an insight into what claims to be “the biggest male-orientated online network” outside the likes of Facebook and Twitter, with some 5 million members on its database, more than 280,000 registered users and around 10,000 posts per day on its comment threads.
Although, in truth, I’m not particularly interested in what the men on PistonHeads have to say about cars – and they really do have a lot to say, whether it is on the subject of BMW key reprogramming thefts or Renault Clio bonnet faults, Golf R lease cancellations or £500 oil changes. I am interested in what these men have to say about emotions and relationships, health and parenting. For the really strange and fascinating thing about PistonHeads is that its mainly male users defy the conventional wisdom that blokes are incapable of talking about feelings, with a good proportion of its hundreds of daily discussions dedicated to non-car subjects such as depression (“Sounds like a good time to go see a doctor and nip it in the bud. If I could roll back time, I’d have tried to sort things when I had the energy”), male grooming (“First time you shave your crack, yeah, it’ll itch like hell when it starts to grow back, but keep on top of it and you’ll have zero problem … The ladies seem to appreciate it”), wheat-free diets (“I’m starting to feel good, and bowel movement is the best I’ve known since my twenties”) and panic attacks (“Usually I make an effort to do some relaxation/meditation to calm down at least twice a day – morning and night …”).
“Yeah,” says Drake in the car, putting his foot down, triggering a deafening roar from the German engine, and not doing much for my own panic issues. “People are always surprised when blokes into cars also turn out to have brains and feelings.”
Which is not to say that the discussion boards do not suffer the habitual effects of too much testosterone. About a decade ago, BBC’sLook North broadcast a news item about alleged death threats made on PistonHeads to speed-safety campaigners. The book threads make you despair for male literary tastes – with posters rarely reading much beyond The Lord of the Rings, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Ultimate History of BMW. Several threads demonstrate the adage that no subject is too banal for people to fight about on the internet, with bad-tempered exchanges over everything from coin collecting to waxed jackets. And one of the most popular “memes” on the website is the decidedly laddish “custard test” – when somebody boasts about owning an improbable car, they are told to post a picture standing next to it with a jar of custard powder (it being the sort of thing you’re likely to have at home, but unlikely to have taken to a car dealership or motor show).
But the site is endlessly surprising – not only for the range of its discussion subjects (dress code for the Savoy, baby poo, cigars, vintage-Rolex hunting, Christmas dinner cooking dilemmas, arachnophobia), but also for the way things are discussed. In the week I go to Wilton, I happen across a post ranting about “kamikaze f***wit Oxford cyclists”. Given PistonHeads is a car website, I fully expect to read hundreds of posts from homicidal drivers agreeing with the sentiment. But one of the first responses is someone saying, “Ah, poor boo boo, got overtaken by a cyclist … Did it make your winky shrink?” And the discussion that follows is remarkably balanced.
Then there is a post about “Ramadan 2014”, inquiring whether anyone is fasting this year, which anywhere else on the internet would give users the perfect excuse to engage in the Islamophobia that is a defining feature of “conversation” on 21st-century discussion boards. But this time, one of the first responses says, “I have nothing but respect for the Islamers who can pull it off … I work with a few and every year I’m impressed by their dedication to it,” and the vast majority of the posts that follow are similarly positive.
The single most life-affirming thing I come across is the response to a post from a father complaining that his three-year-old son likes dressing up in girls’ costumes, complete with hair band (“I’m not a fan of this look, and to be honest it makes me very uncomfortable”). Instead of the homophobia you might expect, one of the first messages says, “I think that it’s you who needs to man up, not your son,” and while the long thread that follows goes to some politically incorrect places (“Start putting away £100/month … sex change ops aren’t cheap”), there are lots of heart-warming responses, not least fathers taking turns to post pictures of their boys dressing up in girls’ clothing (“I don’t mind the dresses, I don’t mind the fact he sings pretty much the entire Diana Ross back catalogue with feeling, I don’t even mind that much that he likes Frozen …”)
The thread is that rare thing on an internet discussion board: moving. If it all sounds rather like a male version of Mumsnet, which clocks up some 25,000 posts and 300,000 hits a day for its discussions on parenting and families and postcoital cleaning rituals, it’s because it is. The founder of Mumsnet, Justine Roberts, was once asked why she hadn’t set up a Dadsnet and replied that it already existed – in the form of PistonHeads. Moreover, a former PistonHeads executive is now a business consultant at Mumsnet, and users have been known good-humouredly to invade each other’s forums. “They’re very similar sites,” says Roberts. “The same issues crop up on both. Although I guess PistonHeads is less campaigning, which might be because its name is confusing for the media.”
Another confusing thing: why PistonHeads has succeeded when dadsnet.net takes you to a discussion board that, according to its own data, has never had more than 77 users on it at one time, and when attempts to set up sites dedicated to sensitive male discussion, such as DaddyBeGood (“The definitive destination for all things ‘dad’, driven by the passionate belief that engaged dads make for a better society”), have not got very far. There seems to be no neat explanations or obvious consensus, with even some of PistonHeads’ own executives rather bewildered by its direction. Various people have various theories, with Justine Roberts’s preferred one being that PistonHeads remains, despite its commercial success, a self-created and self-policed community.
The website was founded in 1999 as a website for a particular brand of car – the TVR. When it was sold in January 2007 to the Haymarket Media Group, which also owns Autocar, What Car? andManagement Today, a business magazine for which I write car reviews, it encompassed all aspects of motoring, but the media company hasn’t, to use its phrasing, “tinkered under the bonnet too much” since purchasing it. It has added editorial and used car classifieds, but the staff remains small, the moderators are volunteers and the forums remain technologically old-fashioned – posting on its boards is like travelling back to 1999. “People are civilised on it because the prevailing people on it want it to be civilised,” says Roberts. “The members set the tone and it is authentic in that way.”
However, cultural critic Stephen Bayley, author of the recent ebook/essay Charm, thinks the secret of PistonHeads’ peculiar success may, paradoxically, be down to its focus on cars. It is tempting, he says, to think of the motoring discussions on the site as separate from the wider conversations about relationships and life. But the two are mutually dependent, not only because when men are talking about their cars, they are usually talking indirectly about their feelings, but because the focus on cars is initially what makes many feel comfortable enough to post. “Cars are heraldry,” he says. “They are both a shield and a costume, both defensive and aggressive.” He adds that it’s a myth that men are incapable of talking about emotional matters – it’s just they are incapable of doing so directly, and are not keen on initiating such conversations in their own right. Go to any football match, allotment shed or pub and, amid the banter, you’ll find blokes talking about all sorts of things. PistonHeads is just the online equivalent.
It’s a theory that appears to be supported on the PistonHeads site by a popular thread in which posters were encouraged to list the major events in their life since 2000. Almost every post ranked major life episodes such as getting married, buying houses, being made redundant, having operations and experiencing bereavement alongside buying or selling or crashing cars.
Is it possible that online anonymity on specialist sites such as PistonHeads can bring out the best in its users – that they use it not to troll, but to have their more emotional, sensitive sides endorsed by their peers? Or maybe the anonymity that often brings out the worst in people on the internet is mitigated on PistonHeads by the fact that it is possible to piece together quite a lot about someone’s life from their posts, and by the fact that members are meeting up increasingly often? The Wilton event is an annual occurrence, but users gather fortnightly for “Sunday Service”, where guests congregate to ogle supercars (up to 800 have turned up). They have regular group excursions to events such as the Le Mans 24-hour race, and there are regular so-called London tunnel runs, where groups of ten cars cruise through tunnels in the city at the crack of dawn, making as much engine noise as possible.
Eventually I catch up with Dan Trent, the editor of the site – ironically, he doesn’t make it to Wilton House because he is competing in a cycle race – who concedes that the chance of meeting might encourage positive online behaviour. He adds, however, that online and offline personalities frequently do not tally. “The ones who are the loudest and most aggressive online are often the quietest and shyest in person.”
Which, as it happens, makes me reappraise what happens on the remainder of my day with the PHers. We end up, after a series of seemingly endless pitstops across central England, mooching around a dedicated PistonHeads car park on Lord Pembroke’s immaculate lawn at Wilton House, seeking shelter from gales and driving rain in a marquee where a bacon bap and tea cost £5. Bunches of PistonHeads regulars sit around mostly in silence, piping up only occasionally to ask one another questions like, “So how many times have you had the engine out?” and, “Is it good around town?”
Far from being more in touch with their feelings than most men, in the flesh they give Top Gear’s Stig a run for his money for terseness, with my questions about the appeal of the website producing responses like, “It’s great for car stuff,” and, “It’s a good place to go if I need to know if I can fit winter tyres on my rims.” And more elaborate efforts to get them to talk about their feelings, such as, “Given the choice of anyone in the world, who would you want as a dinner guest?” and, “For what in your life do you feel most grateful?” producing little beyond nervous laughter.
The men include Keith Brown, a 40-year-old maintenance engineer from Southampton, who, when I ask him about the quality that first attracted him to his girlfriend, replies, “Well, I have a Lancia Integrale and she has a Golf GTI, and the first time I showed her a picture of it she said, ‘Oh, that’s like a Golf with a body kit on it.’ So I guess it was fate.” Then there is Jeremy Gann, a 60-year-old retired engineer surveyor, who spells out his name by saying it is, “Jeremy, as in Jeremy Clarkson”, and who, when I ask him what love feels like, replies, “like driving a Honda NSX when you red-line it at 8000 revs”. His long-suffering partner, sitting behind him, rolls her eyes. Peering out into the driving rain, she mutters, “I can think of other places I’d rather be.”
Pistonheads on... fatherhood
Khevolution: Don’t even get me started on pushchairs. I thought choosing a new car was difficult. Anybody got any suggestions/recommendations?
Davey S2: We went for the UPPAbaby Vista, which has been theWhich? Best Buy a few times. Obviously I’ve given it a comprehensive test around the house to check its cornering capabilities! Very well-screwed-together piece of kit.
ArsE92: I worked out the price of nappies, it’s 9p every poo.
HereBeMonsters: I’ve sold the Elise and bought a Honda Insight. Can only mean one thing … It’s a boy! Arrived March 3 after a less than 4-hour labour: not bad for first child. Good work, wife!
Oakey: Week 1: God, he’s so boring. All he does is sleep. When’s he going to do something interesting? Week 6: HOLY CRAP, WHEN DOES IT SLEEP? IT’S BEEN THREE DAYS NOW; HE’S LIKE A MACHINE.
dangerousB: Now I understand why new dads don’t post a day or two after their newborn has arrived! Bloody glad to announce, though, that my courageous girlfriend gave birth to our lovely little baby girl on May 3. Oh my God, was it arduous – 52 hours start to finish, cord around her neck, a litre of blood lost. Tough to be a spectator.
Pistonheads on... the death of a pet
garyhun: As most of you know, I lost Jaz, my 17-year-old Westie, almost two weeks ago. I cried pretty much continually for the first five days, with day five being angry and sad all at the same time. Since then I’ve been able to smile while remembering the great times we had together. BUT – there is this constant feeling of loss, like all the joy has been sucked out of me. I feel like I’ll never be happy again, even though I know that’s not the case.
Lotus Notes: I’m sorry for your loss. Seventeen years is a long time; there must be plenty of great memories of the little fellow. It’ll be raw for quite a time yet and there will be reminders for ever, but only the good times.
Pistonheads on... depression
Ruskie: Having been back through five months of threads, I can’t see one on depression. What are people’s personal experiences? I have never been diagnosed or anything, but some days I have what can only be described as a “fog” in my head that makes me lethargic, uninterested, moody and incapable of decent interaction. No warning or pattern; it just happens. Can last a day or sometimes a week. If I am just left alone I come out of it fine, but that’s the problem – it’s impossible with work/family commitments, so my OH gets the brunt of it, which is not fair. Leading to me denying it’s me and just ignoring her efforts to talk. Just wondered what other people’s thoughts on the matter are, or indeed on my personal experience?
BJG1: Sounds like a good time to go see a doctor and nip it in the bud. If I could roll back time, I’d have tried to sort things when I had the energy and it was just starting to manifest itself. If you try to ignore days like that they’ll only become the norm, and then things will start to get too much.
Mobile Chicane: Lots of us here suffer from this – just bear with the PistonHeads search function and keep searching! Little warm (entirely fraternal) hugs, MC xx
grumbledoak: Incidentally, internet fora are disproportionately populated by the depressed, because it is something you can do without leaving the house.
Thom987: Also something you can do when you can’t sleep, as can be seen by my late-night/early-morning posts.
Pistonheads on... relationships
RobinBanks: She replies to my texts with, “F*** k off, stalker! I don’t even know who you are!” I do love that sense of humour!
Blib: She earns loads more [than I do]. But, then again, she’s a highfalutin City lawyer and I’m just a retired, broken-down drunk.
elster: On the plus side, you’re a retired drunk whose OH is a high-flying City lawyer …
George Utley
It’s 7am on Sunday and I am standing with several hundred men I’ve never met before in Fleet Services on the M3. The car park is packed with the flash vehicles that have ferried us here – Ferraris, Lamborghinis, Porsches and the like. The supercars are being lashed by torrential rain, hail and gales, which are forecast to intensify during the day. Meanwhile, indoors, patience is being severely tested by an overwhelmed Starbucks concession.
Having woken at 3.40am to be here, I can barely speak with tiredness. It is possible the men I’m with feel the same; they’re just as mute, with one behind me silently posting photographs of his own car onto his Instagram account, and one in front of me using the short break from driving to play Crazy Taxi on his iPad. The sound of someone actually saying something startles us all.
“Bloody hell, a GT-R.”
Everyone looks round and it turns out the exclamation is a rhetorical one, made in response to the arrival of a Japanese car that has just pulled up next to the Times photographer’s 12-year-old Mercedes E320 CDI, which, with its dodgy ABS and tendency to emit a puff of black smoke on acceleration and braking, has been proving rather an embarrassment all morning. The speaker continues, nodding to himself in disbelief, as if hit suddenly by the size of the public sector borrowing deficit or by a woeful revelation about the situation in Iraq.
“Five hundred pounds for an oil change.”
There is a long pause and an even longer wait for coffee. Eventually, still seemingly in a state of shock, he puts on his cagoule, walks out, gets into his own sports car and, along with tens of others, drives off westwards, to repeat the scene in another car park in another part of the country.
What am I doing hanging out at such an ungodly hour with these monosyllabic men? I am participating in 2014’s Wilton Classic and Supercar show. To be more specific, I am with the contingent from the PistonHeads website, riding in the supercar parade from Weybridge to Salisbury in an Audi R8 with James Drake, one of the website’s executives. It’s to gain an insight into what claims to be “the biggest male-orientated online network” outside the likes of Facebook and Twitter, with some 5 million members on its database, more than 280,000 registered users and around 10,000 posts per day on its comment threads.
Although, in truth, I’m not particularly interested in what the men on PistonHeads have to say about cars – and they really do have a lot to say, whether it is on the subject of BMW key reprogramming thefts or Renault Clio bonnet faults, Golf R lease cancellations or £500 oil changes. I am interested in what these men have to say about emotions and relationships, health and parenting. For the really strange and fascinating thing about PistonHeads is that its mainly male users defy the conventional wisdom that blokes are incapable of talking about feelings, with a good proportion of its hundreds of daily discussions dedicated to non-car subjects such as depression (“Sounds like a good time to go see a doctor and nip it in the bud. If I could roll back time, I’d have tried to sort things when I had the energy”), male grooming (“First time you shave your crack, yeah, it’ll itch like hell when it starts to grow back, but keep on top of it and you’ll have zero problem … The ladies seem to appreciate it”), wheat-free diets (“I’m starting to feel good, and bowel movement is the best I’ve known since my twenties”) and panic attacks (“Usually I make an effort to do some relaxation/meditation to calm down at least twice a day – morning and night …”).
“Yeah,” says Drake in the car, putting his foot down, triggering a deafening roar from the German engine, and not doing much for my own panic issues. “People are always surprised when blokes into cars also turn out to have brains and feelings.”
Which is not to say that the discussion boards do not suffer the habitual effects of too much testosterone. About a decade ago, BBC’sLook North broadcast a news item about alleged death threats made on PistonHeads to speed-safety campaigners. The book threads make you despair for male literary tastes – with posters rarely reading much beyond The Lord of the Rings, The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and The Ultimate History of BMW. Several threads demonstrate the adage that no subject is too banal for people to fight about on the internet, with bad-tempered exchanges over everything from coin collecting to waxed jackets. And one of the most popular “memes” on the website is the decidedly laddish “custard test” – when somebody boasts about owning an improbable car, they are told to post a picture standing next to it with a jar of custard powder (it being the sort of thing you’re likely to have at home, but unlikely to have taken to a car dealership or motor show).
But the site is endlessly surprising – not only for the range of its discussion subjects (dress code for the Savoy, baby poo, cigars, vintage-Rolex hunting, Christmas dinner cooking dilemmas, arachnophobia), but also for the way things are discussed. In the week I go to Wilton, I happen across a post ranting about “kamikaze f***wit Oxford cyclists”. Given PistonHeads is a car website, I fully expect to read hundreds of posts from homicidal drivers agreeing with the sentiment. But one of the first responses is someone saying, “Ah, poor boo boo, got overtaken by a cyclist … Did it make your winky shrink?” And the discussion that follows is remarkably balanced.
Then there is a post about “Ramadan 2014”, inquiring whether anyone is fasting this year, which anywhere else on the internet would give users the perfect excuse to engage in the Islamophobia that is a defining feature of “conversation” on 21st-century discussion boards. But this time, one of the first responses says, “I have nothing but respect for the Islamers who can pull it off … I work with a few and every year I’m impressed by their dedication to it,” and the vast majority of the posts that follow are similarly positive.
The single most life-affirming thing I come across is the response to a post from a father complaining that his three-year-old son likes dressing up in girls’ costumes, complete with hair band (“I’m not a fan of this look, and to be honest it makes me very uncomfortable”). Instead of the homophobia you might expect, one of the first messages says, “I think that it’s you who needs to man up, not your son,” and while the long thread that follows goes to some politically incorrect places (“Start putting away £100/month … sex change ops aren’t cheap”), there are lots of heart-warming responses, not least fathers taking turns to post pictures of their boys dressing up in girls’ clothing (“I don’t mind the dresses, I don’t mind the fact he sings pretty much the entire Diana Ross back catalogue with feeling, I don’t even mind that much that he likes Frozen …”)
The thread is that rare thing on an internet discussion board: moving. If it all sounds rather like a male version of Mumsnet, which clocks up some 25,000 posts and 300,000 hits a day for its discussions on parenting and families and postcoital cleaning rituals, it’s because it is. The founder of Mumsnet, Justine Roberts, was once asked why she hadn’t set up a Dadsnet and replied that it already existed – in the form of PistonHeads. Moreover, a former PistonHeads executive is now a business consultant at Mumsnet, and users have been known good-humouredly to invade each other’s forums. “They’re very similar sites,” says Roberts. “The same issues crop up on both. Although I guess PistonHeads is less campaigning, which might be because its name is confusing for the media.”
Another confusing thing: why PistonHeads has succeeded when dadsnet.net takes you to a discussion board that, according to its own data, has never had more than 77 users on it at one time, and when attempts to set up sites dedicated to sensitive male discussion, such as DaddyBeGood (“The definitive destination for all things ‘dad’, driven by the passionate belief that engaged dads make for a better society”), have not got very far. There seems to be no neat explanations or obvious consensus, with even some of PistonHeads’ own executives rather bewildered by its direction. Various people have various theories, with Justine Roberts’s preferred one being that PistonHeads remains, despite its commercial success, a self-created and self-policed community.
The website was founded in 1999 as a website for a particular brand of car – the TVR. When it was sold in January 2007 to the Haymarket Media Group, which also owns Autocar, What Car? andManagement Today, a business magazine for which I write car reviews, it encompassed all aspects of motoring, but the media company hasn’t, to use its phrasing, “tinkered under the bonnet too much” since purchasing it. It has added editorial and used car classifieds, but the staff remains small, the moderators are volunteers and the forums remain technologically old-fashioned – posting on its boards is like travelling back to 1999. “People are civilised on it because the prevailing people on it want it to be civilised,” says Roberts. “The members set the tone and it is authentic in that way.”
However, cultural critic Stephen Bayley, author of the recent ebook/essay Charm, thinks the secret of PistonHeads’ peculiar success may, paradoxically, be down to its focus on cars. It is tempting, he says, to think of the motoring discussions on the site as separate from the wider conversations about relationships and life. But the two are mutually dependent, not only because when men are talking about their cars, they are usually talking indirectly about their feelings, but because the focus on cars is initially what makes many feel comfortable enough to post. “Cars are heraldry,” he says. “They are both a shield and a costume, both defensive and aggressive.” He adds that it’s a myth that men are incapable of talking about emotional matters – it’s just they are incapable of doing so directly, and are not keen on initiating such conversations in their own right. Go to any football match, allotment shed or pub and, amid the banter, you’ll find blokes talking about all sorts of things. PistonHeads is just the online equivalent.
It’s a theory that appears to be supported on the PistonHeads site by a popular thread in which posters were encouraged to list the major events in their life since 2000. Almost every post ranked major life episodes such as getting married, buying houses, being made redundant, having operations and experiencing bereavement alongside buying or selling or crashing cars.
Is it possible that online anonymity on specialist sites such as PistonHeads can bring out the best in its users – that they use it not to troll, but to have their more emotional, sensitive sides endorsed by their peers? Or maybe the anonymity that often brings out the worst in people on the internet is mitigated on PistonHeads by the fact that it is possible to piece together quite a lot about someone’s life from their posts, and by the fact that members are meeting up increasingly often? The Wilton event is an annual occurrence, but users gather fortnightly for “Sunday Service”, where guests congregate to ogle supercars (up to 800 have turned up). They have regular group excursions to events such as the Le Mans 24-hour race, and there are regular so-called London tunnel runs, where groups of ten cars cruise through tunnels in the city at the crack of dawn, making as much engine noise as possible.
Eventually I catch up with Dan Trent, the editor of the site – ironically, he doesn’t make it to Wilton House because he is competing in a cycle race – who concedes that the chance of meeting might encourage positive online behaviour. He adds, however, that online and offline personalities frequently do not tally. “The ones who are the loudest and most aggressive online are often the quietest and shyest in person.”
Which, as it happens, makes me reappraise what happens on the remainder of my day with the PHers. We end up, after a series of seemingly endless pitstops across central England, mooching around a dedicated PistonHeads car park on Lord Pembroke’s immaculate lawn at Wilton House, seeking shelter from gales and driving rain in a marquee where a bacon bap and tea cost £5. Bunches of PistonHeads regulars sit around mostly in silence, piping up only occasionally to ask one another questions like, “So how many times have you had the engine out?” and, “Is it good around town?”
Far from being more in touch with their feelings than most men, in the flesh they give Top Gear’s Stig a run for his money for terseness, with my questions about the appeal of the website producing responses like, “It’s great for car stuff,” and, “It’s a good place to go if I need to know if I can fit winter tyres on my rims.” And more elaborate efforts to get them to talk about their feelings, such as, “Given the choice of anyone in the world, who would you want as a dinner guest?” and, “For what in your life do you feel most grateful?” producing little beyond nervous laughter.
The men include Keith Brown, a 40-year-old maintenance engineer from Southampton, who, when I ask him about the quality that first attracted him to his girlfriend, replies, “Well, I have a Lancia Integrale and she has a Golf GTI, and the first time I showed her a picture of it she said, ‘Oh, that’s like a Golf with a body kit on it.’ So I guess it was fate.” Then there is Jeremy Gann, a 60-year-old retired engineer surveyor, who spells out his name by saying it is, “Jeremy, as in Jeremy Clarkson”, and who, when I ask him what love feels like, replies, “like driving a Honda NSX when you red-line it at 8000 revs”. His long-suffering partner, sitting behind him, rolls her eyes. Peering out into the driving rain, she mutters, “I can think of other places I’d rather be.”
Pistonheads on... fatherhood
Khevolution: Don’t even get me started on pushchairs. I thought choosing a new car was difficult. Anybody got any suggestions/recommendations?
Davey S2: We went for the UPPAbaby Vista, which has been theWhich? Best Buy a few times. Obviously I’ve given it a comprehensive test around the house to check its cornering capabilities! Very well-screwed-together piece of kit.
ArsE92: I worked out the price of nappies, it’s 9p every poo.
HereBeMonsters: I’ve sold the Elise and bought a Honda Insight. Can only mean one thing … It’s a boy! Arrived March 3 after a less than 4-hour labour: not bad for first child. Good work, wife!
Oakey: Week 1: God, he’s so boring. All he does is sleep. When’s he going to do something interesting? Week 6: HOLY CRAP, WHEN DOES IT SLEEP? IT’S BEEN THREE DAYS NOW; HE’S LIKE A MACHINE.
dangerousB: Now I understand why new dads don’t post a day or two after their newborn has arrived! Bloody glad to announce, though, that my courageous girlfriend gave birth to our lovely little baby girl on May 3. Oh my God, was it arduous – 52 hours start to finish, cord around her neck, a litre of blood lost. Tough to be a spectator.
Pistonheads on... the death of a pet
garyhun: As most of you know, I lost Jaz, my 17-year-old Westie, almost two weeks ago. I cried pretty much continually for the first five days, with day five being angry and sad all at the same time. Since then I’ve been able to smile while remembering the great times we had together. BUT – there is this constant feeling of loss, like all the joy has been sucked out of me. I feel like I’ll never be happy again, even though I know that’s not the case.
Lotus Notes: I’m sorry for your loss. Seventeen years is a long time; there must be plenty of great memories of the little fellow. It’ll be raw for quite a time yet and there will be reminders for ever, but only the good times.
Pistonheads on... depression
Ruskie: Having been back through five months of threads, I can’t see one on depression. What are people’s personal experiences? I have never been diagnosed or anything, but some days I have what can only be described as a “fog” in my head that makes me lethargic, uninterested, moody and incapable of decent interaction. No warning or pattern; it just happens. Can last a day or sometimes a week. If I am just left alone I come out of it fine, but that’s the problem – it’s impossible with work/family commitments, so my OH gets the brunt of it, which is not fair. Leading to me denying it’s me and just ignoring her efforts to talk. Just wondered what other people’s thoughts on the matter are, or indeed on my personal experience?
BJG1: Sounds like a good time to go see a doctor and nip it in the bud. If I could roll back time, I’d have tried to sort things when I had the energy and it was just starting to manifest itself. If you try to ignore days like that they’ll only become the norm, and then things will start to get too much.
Mobile Chicane: Lots of us here suffer from this – just bear with the PistonHeads search function and keep searching! Little warm (entirely fraternal) hugs, MC xx
grumbledoak: Incidentally, internet fora are disproportionately populated by the depressed, because it is something you can do without leaving the house.
Thom987: Also something you can do when you can’t sleep, as can be seen by my late-night/early-morning posts.
Pistonheads on... relationships
RobinBanks: She replies to my texts with, “F*** k off, stalker! I don’t even know who you are!” I do love that sense of humour!
Blib: She earns loads more [than I do]. But, then again, she’s a highfalutin City lawyer and I’m just a retired, broken-down drunk.
elster: On the plus side, you’re a retired drunk whose OH is a high-flying City lawyer …
George Utley
rehab71 said:
jmorgan said:
First the telegraph, then the times, bit of spin going on to up the traffic.....
When was PH in The Telegraph?Edit
Here we go
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/men/the-filter/11250691...
All we need now is the Daily Wail to do one, probably where we encourage something terrible to kill us all to death.
Edited by jmorgan on Saturday 29th November 14:37
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