Footnotes From France 5

I suspect people who write fiction, write thrillers or detective stories or village dramas can sit in front of their laptop, or at their desk with pen and paper and produce pages and pages every day.  I also suspect that those folks who strive to produce non-fictional accounts of historical events, or biographies, or political analyses of past governments, spend much time grappling with research materials, cross-referencing, hunting through notes or other books or press cuttings to find a reference they need.  In other words, the actual transfer of ideas and facts and experiences onto the page takes time!

Countless times yesterday I disappeared off down different rabbit holes of information, looking for the reference I needed – did all of the Porsches in the Marathon have the heavy duty steel protection cages to shield them from wayward marsupials?  Was there really a large painting of a tortoise atop the roof of the little Morris 1100?  Was it just a Ford Cortina that ran on remould tyres (as a stunt to promote a tyre remoulds company!), or did the Peugeot have them too?  For me it’s all fascinating stuff, but the challenge is to make it interesting for a reader.  My mantra, as I write and research, is quite simply “This is not for those who already know about the Marathon, but for those who don’t”, and I will be quite happy for the many BMC 1800 or Lotus Cortina enthusiasts, or experts in the history of factory motorsports divisions to find scant information about the technical specification of an overhead camshaft engine with decreased compression, or the exact measurements of a protection cover for a Mercedes hydraulic clutch operating cylinder, or whether to have variamatic steering on a 5 litre V8 Holden with automatic transmission and 14”wheels or…

See where I’m going with this?  I am keeping in my mind people who know little or nothing about the great trans-world adventure of November and December 1968, and therefore the human stories of success and failure on the road to Sydney.  Now I may well refer to things like ‘radiator mounting’, or ‘head gasket’ or ‘tappet tools’ from time to time, but only in context, have no fear.

Right, where was that reference to the guy who crashed and damaged his car the day before the Marathon set off?

PS Spare a thought for Rob today, as he travels into London and onwards to the Olympic Park to watch the Opening Ceremony.  I suspect he didn’t sleep much last night!