Members will have noticed from time to time an advert in the Advertiser for a dehumidifier from Manage Air. They supposedly dry the air in the garage. Maybe they do that. For certain they produce gallons of pure water, the real HO2 as was described to us way back in chemistry lessons. This is the distillation process and water appears by magic in a bucket without any pipes connected to it. If this water has a value it has to be enhanced by the fact that it came from the exalted atmosphere of a Rolls-Royce.
I leave the still switched on when the car is in residence and it presumably has an effect upon the bicycles and venerable Renault which share breathing space. The trick is to block off all gaps through which outside air might get into the garage so that you are not trying to dry South Wales. Apparently these machines do not sell well in Las Vegas.

Reliabilty

Rolls-Royce built its reputation on reliability and I was disappointed to hear an owner of a Silver Shadow II similar to mine say that he would be pleased to use his Rolls-Royce as an every day business car instead of the four wheel drive Japanese thing if only it was reliable. So obviously his car is unreliable. Then that is his fault. He bought it for the same price as an almost new Ford Escort, gets it serviced by a competent mechanic who is good at non-Rolls-Royce cars and gets upset if service bills are more than he spends on the Jap thing.
I bought my Shadow II for £13,500 and have probably spent much more than that getting it right, up-grading the suspension and fitting a low back pressure stainless exhaust. It struggles to go over 125 mph but can be driven foot down from here to Switzerland and back only slowing for the toll gates in France. A Ferrari might be a bit faster but nothing is more comfortable. There have been letters in the Bulletin over the past couple of years comparing the late Shadows to modern fuel injected cars and concluding that on the road the twenty year old car is the better ride and just as reliable as a new Mercedes. If you are thinking of a Shadow II then either spend over £20,000 with a franchised dealer or known specialist or spend half that and be prepared to pay as much again for maintenance. After parting with anything up to £30,000 you will have one of the best cars ever built without the cost of depreciation and it will be totally reliable.

Image

I was lucky enough to find a new wife who is a bit older than my car. Why then should it be said that I have an old car and a young wife?
Whether we like it or not (and most of us do like it) the Rolls-Royce has an image. Men love it and women generally don't know how to handle it. They can dance and flaunt jewellery but they don't know how to respond to a parthenon radiator and an engine six times bigger than the one in their own car. They usually settle for grumbling. This is worse than a rattle in the back end. I was therefore lucky to find that my new wife had never heard of a Rolls-Royce so she had no opinion about it. In fact she did not know anything about cars. This might be the start of a lesson on wife selection but we'll leave that for later. It was interesting that after a few months of riding around in the Renault 18 and the Rolls-Royce she declared that she preferred the Rolls-Royce. She was therefore miffed when she started driving lessons to learn that she would have to drive the Renault when she passed her test, which she did, because, I told her, the Rolls-Royce does not have gears and it takes ten years to learn how to drive a car without gears.

Somehow she discovered what the Rolls-Royce costs to run and she has started to show a few English characteristics with comments like, "I don't cost you as much as the car does," and "Sometimes I think you love your car more than me." If I had never been married before such remarks would be worrying but second time around I know how to handle them.
The standard answer is, "What you need is a Bentley."
"Why a Bentley?"
"Because it is safe and you will look good in it."
It is only a simple side step then to keep the conversation on the question of what colour she would prefer. Of course you are not going to buy a yellow Bentley, it will be dark green or blue, but she realises how much you love her and promises to wash and polish it.