Mon incompréhension est ma plus grande qualité car elle laisse une place a l'imagination.

This is a Datsun 1600. It went by the name of the Datsun 510 in the US, where it was apparently known as the “poor man’s BMW.”

I see this car every morning as I approach work. It is usually sitting on its own at the Silo’s end of Salamanca place, and I have no idea who actually owns it or why it is parked there. Even though I have no idea who it belongs to, every day I like to exercise my imagination and mentally prepare a brief back story of the owner. A guy has to have a hobby, what can I say?

This other morning was a good one. On Tuesday, the owner was a ruggedly handsome Mossad agent who is deeply penetrated into a shadowy organisation that ostensibly facilitates theatre programmes for prisoners on day release, but in reality operates as a sleeper cell that recruits and trains ‘cleaners’ for splinter groups administered by rogue elements of the Palestinian Authority. He is a great dancer and his hair always smells very nice.

Yesterday, the owner was an elderly gent who takes great pride in his appearance and – despite him never having claimed so – is assumed by almost everyone he meets to be mourning a wife that he loved very deeply and for whom he retains that love. In fact, he is a lifelong bachelor from who moved to Tasmania from another state after an unsavoury misunderstanding at his (then) local bowls club. The man has a distasteful predilection for girls in their late-teens and early twenties, and he utilises the erroneous assumption that he mourns a lost love to his advantage. It seems that pity affords him the opportunity to leer at the supple and ripe young bodies, the memories of which serve as fodder for his perverted fantasies. He never acts on these fantasies, but sometimes the looking is more than enough to upset people who – even though they’d never say it – think that he is a creepy old man.

This morning, the owner is a young lad who has loaned his car to his mother while he is off trekking around Laos and Cambodia for three months. He has named the car “Delta” after his ex-girlfriend’s favourite singer from the radio. His mother refuses to use the name though, as she feels to give a car a name is a foolish thing to do. She thinks that she is unhappy, but she doesn’t know why. Her husband loves her, even if he struggles to reveal it openly sometimes. Her son also loves her and chastises himself for not telling her more. For a woman of her vintage, she has retained a girlish figure and an impish smile that stranger like. She thinks that she might be going through ‘the change’, but I think that it is more likely to be the weather.

It has been hot.