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Time to print a correction in the blog because for some reason there is a misconception around my opinion on automobiles and all things mechanical.

Worth mentioning here that my dad is a retired motor mechanic. He served in the motor trade for more than 50 years and in fact he worked evenings and weekends in the garage beside our house all the way through my childhood.

The smell of oil, the sound of wheel nuts being hammered off and watching my dad do cylinder head gaskets in a small garage beside our house are things that I will never forget.

I even worked for a very short while as my dad went out on his own with a partner in a small garage before he went back to work for the garage he worked at for most of his life.

I saw a lot of cars being fixed and a lot of cars in bits. In fact, I know quite a lot more about cars than I care to let on about.

For the record… and to be stated here for ever to be returned to when I get harangued by people… My car of choice at the present time if I were buying something expensive would be a brand-new Porsche 911 GTS (convertible).

I completely understand the limitations of a convertible in a car of such performance but that’s up to me and if I was going to buy this then I would go and spend a day in the Porsche garage with my son and we would choose every single element of that car exactly the way we wanted it and then we would get it.

I’m not ready to do that yet for various reasons (mostly because I don’t want to yet) and so when I come up against people who say “Oh you’re the Colin Campbell who hates cars” it is perhaps the most ridiculous sentiment.

One of my very best friends was lucky enough to take delivery of a brand-new super car this year (it doesn’t matter which one it was) He invited both Callum and I to come across and share it with him and in fact offered me the keys to take Callum out in the car – father and son in the super car, what a moment!

I didn’t take the keys and I let him do the driving (he’s a much better driver than me and it’s his car and is worth an awful lot of money if I put it backwards into a lamppost!)

For the record I can tell you that soon after going in the car with my friend we were passing quite quickly down a road near his house and I had both hands on the dashboard and was screaming like a baby for mercy. It was so fast and so extraordinary!

My brother-in-law has a Maserati.

I used to have a BMW Z3 2.8 before I had kids.

I don’t hate cars. I hate what some people do with cars.

This is a societal problem, not a dental problem but I mostly hate it in dentistry.

I hate the way some people (and this is a minority) parade cars as something they are entitled to as a result of their amazing work and amazing prowess in business and they show it to people further down in the profession as a shiny, bright object that they can aspire to and infer that if they don’t get there then they’ve failed.

For the record, that is my problem with cars.

It’s like a presentation of success when in fact success in clinical healthcare is measured in 1000 other ways and cars are just a symptom of that success, not a product of it.

Blog Post Number: 1907