The Disco Potato

There is something faintly heroic about arranging to buy a precision German turbocharger from a man called Joe in deepest, darkest South Wales - and discovering he is not a bloke in a lay by at all, but a twenty something with a proper unit and a race MX 5 in pieces inside it.

Not a tarp and a Halfords toolkit. A real workshop. Cars on ramps. Panels off. The faint smell of oil and determination.

The Garrett had been fitted to his 1.6 race car. Which, as it turns out, was ambitious. The turbo was not the weak link. The cylinder head was. Boost arrived, torque followed, and the head lifted. Oil everywhere. Turbo untouched. There is something reassuring about that. It did not fail. It simply exceeded the tensile strength of its surroundings.

Joe mentioned, almost amused, that one chap had offered him 400 quid if he could collect that day. As if urgency halves the value of forged internals. Joe’s reply was perfect. "How much for collecting tomorrow then."

Quite right too. Because this was not a mystery hybrid wrapped in bravado or a Chinese knock-off. It was a genuine GT2860RS. Serial plate intact. 836026-5014S. Made in Mexico. No shaft play. The sort of thing that would have been £1,600 to "2,000 new when people bought them in boxes with warranty cards rather than in conversations over workbenches.

To add to the theatre, I had spotted another Garrett in Chichester for 200 quid. Either a GT2560R or a GT2860R, the advert cheerfully unsure which. No obvious part numbers. Rebuilt “a few years ago”. Not used since. With the usual crack by the wastegate post. Cheap for a reason. The automotive equivalent of “possibly Labrador, possibly horse”.

Joe, by contrast, did not just wipe the oil off when the 1.6 tried to redecorate the engine bay. He had the turbo professionally inspected and dynamically balanced. There was even a German report from TurboService Berlin to prove it. Proper serial number on the sheet. Proper balancing graph. Spun to well over 100,000 rpm on a machine that knows what it is doing, not on a forum thread.

Which rather undermines the chap who thought 400 quid and a sense of urgency would seal the deal.

What made it better was that Joe did not just take the money and vanish. He started talking injectors. Flow rates. Sensible duty cycle margins. What works on a BP4W and what does not. He suggested a fuel injector specification that actually aligned with the power target, then said to tap him any time if I needed advice. Which, frankly, you do not always expect from someone in his twenties selling performance parts. Petrolhead, yes. Forum parrot, no.

You stand there looking at a 1.6 that lost a head gasket to enthusiasm and think: on that engine, it was too much. On a 1.8 Mazda MX-5 engine in a Triumph GT6, it is exactly where it should be.

You drive home with a Disco Potato in the boot, a German balancing report folded in the passenger seat, and the quiet sense that sometimes Marketplace is not a swamp at all. Sometimes it is just a young bloke in South Wales who knows what he is selling, knows what it is worth, and is not daft enough to knock 300 quid off because someone is ready to collect.

Oil all over his engine bay. None in mine. Yet.

Brexitus Flagellator Vulgaris

Brexshitters always remind me of that bloke who supports Dulwich Hamlet like it’s Real Madrid.

Standing there in the drizzle, plastic pint in hand, floodlights flickering, and he’s telling you this is the greatest footballing institution on earth. You gently mention the league table. He tells you the league table is biased.

That’s Brexit in a nutshell.

Deep down, I don’t think half of them are fully convinced the EU is the bogeyman they pretend it is. There’s always that tiny pause when you mention trade friction, investment drifting elsewhere, paperwork piling up at Dover. You can see the brain trying to engage. Then the scarf gets adjusted and it’s back to “sovereignty” and “taking back control”.

Because once you’ve nailed your colours to the mast, you can’t very well admit the team might be mid table.

So instead we get the full performance. Everything is woke. Everything is lefty. Net Zero is a plot to confiscate your lawnmower. Wind turbines are apparently a personal insult. Brussels is still somehow to blame, even though we left years ago. It’s like blaming the old manager for the fact the current squad can’t complete three passes without hoofing it into Row Z.

Reform provide the terrace chant. Deport 600,000. Slash taxes by billions. Scrap Net Zero. Drill everywhere. It doesn’t matter that the numbers don’t add up, the logistics are fantasy, or the North Sea is running on fumes. It sounds good when you shout it in unison. That’s the point. It’s belonging, not thinking.

Then comes the flagshagging. Union Flag profile pictures. Caps. Stickers. Performative outrage about anyone who doesn’t clap loudly enough at the national anthem. Patriotism not as quiet pride, but as a competitive sport. The louder the shout, the thinner the argument.

And the EU manages to be both an evil dictatorship and a useless basket case at the same time. All powerful and totally incompetent. Net Zero is destroying Europe, except Europe’s renewables are quietly attracting investment and cutting costs. Nobody ever pauses to notice the contradiction. That would require a moment of reflection, and that ruins the singalong.

So they keep insisting their non league side is secretly Champions League material. Wave the flag, boo the referee, blame the wind turbines, call it common sense.

It’s not analysis. It’s fandom.

And fandom is fine for football. It’s less convincing as a national economic and energy strategy.

I rather enjoy dismantling them with calm, evidence-based reasoning. It’s not about converting the die-hards - you can't convert a football fan. It’s about making sure anyone watching can see the difference between noise and fact - and to give them a laugh.

Middle of Lidl Day

Retirement introduces you to calendars you didn’t know existed.

Not the obvious ones. Bank holidays. Birthdays. Appointments you absolutely will forget until ten minutes after they start. I mean the unofficial calendars. The ones that only matter once your diary stops being owned by other people.

Chief among them is Middle of Lidl Day.

Middle of Lidl Day is not a suggestion. It is not approximate. It is Thursday. Fixed. Canonical. Immutable. Anyone who says otherwise is either lying or shops exclusively at Waitrose and cannot be trusted on these matters.

Thursday acquires structure in retirement in a way Monday never does. The morning is arranged around it. Breakfast is timed. Other errands are quietly deprioritised. You don’t want to arrive too late and find the good things gone, leaving only the haunted remains of last week’s optimism and a single left foot thermal sock staring back at you accusingly.

You don’t go to Lidl for Middle of Lidl, obviously. That would be admitting something. You go because you “need a few bits”. Milk. Bread. Cheese. Items chosen to project restraint and adult responsibility. Then, like a migratory instinct kicking in, you drift. Drawn inexorably towards the middle aisle, where logic loosens its tie and lies down for a bit.

The middle aisle runs on a precise emotional sequence. Curiosity. Disbelief. Mild disdain. Rationalisation. Acceptance. You start with “Who on earth buys this?” You end with “Well, it is very good value”. Somewhere between the welding gloves and the collapsible step stool, you decide that not buying it would be fiscally irresponsible.

This is retirement commerce at its purest. No research phase. No review trawling written by men furious about torque settings. Just impulse, justification, and the immediate satisfaction of leaving the shop with the thing already in your hands. No tracking number. No three day wait. No lingering uncertainty about whether you actually pressed “Buy it Now”.

Which matters more than it should.

Because retirement does odd things to anticipation. You can spend days quietly excited about something you are sure you ordered on eBay. Not urgently. Just a background hum of expectation. You picture where it will go. You imagine the small improvement it will bring. You listen out for vans. You check the drive when one passes, just in case.

Then, after several days of patient optimism, you check your emails and discover you never actually ordered it. You shortlisted it. You considered it carefully. You may even have negotiated internally about whether it was strictly necessary. But at no point did you press “Buy it Now”.

This does not reduce the disappointment. It intensifies it. You haven’t lost a parcel. You’ve lost a future you’d already partially inhabited. Somewhere in your head, that item had arrived, been unpacked, and perhaps even justified its existence. Now it turns out it exists only as an idea you were genuinely looking forward to owning.

Lidl solves this problem brutally. You see the tool. You touch the tool. You own the tool. Instantly. The dopamine lands immediately, bypassing the fragile hope of a courier and the existential risk of your own inattention. It is gratification without suspense, which in retirement feels not indulgent but efficient.

And this is where the budget quietly comes undone.

The shopping budget is meant to be for food. It says so quite clearly. It has been explained to itself many times. And yet, over the years, it has increased by roughly a third without any corresponding rise in appetite. You are not eating more. If anything, you are eating less. The bread is the same. The milk is the same. The cheese is smaller and angrier, but that is inflation’s fault.

The missing third is standing on the kitchen worktop while you unpack the bags. Bread. Milk. Cheese. And a pipe cutter. Again. Not extravagantly. Just quietly. A clamp here. A multi bit screwdriver there. Items that are absolutely not groceries but which, at the point of purchase, felt adjacent to survival. A man cannot live on bread alone, but he can live very comfortably with a cordless inspection lamp acquired on a Thursday.

You have not spent money. You have improved resilience. You have invested in optional capability. You have avoided the risk of waiting three days for a parcel that may never have been ordered. Categories, like schedules, soften with age.

Aldi, meanwhile, remains a disappointment.

I have never managed to determine Middle of Aldi Day, largely because it barely feels like a thing. Aldi’s middle aisle always looks slightly tatty, as if it has wandered in from a car boot sale and decided to stay. The tools are there, technically, but they feel like an afterthought. A begrudging nod to men who might otherwise feel excluded. A soldering iron dumped next to novelty socks, looking embarrassed about the whole arrangement.

Lidl curates. Aldi shrugs.

Lidl’s middle aisle feels intentional. Someone, somewhere, has imagined a man pausing thoughtfully over a torque wrench and thought, yes, he’ll like that. Aldi’s version feels as if the tools arrived by accident, late, and without anyone quite knowing why. Lidl invites you to browse. Aldi dares you to cope. Lidl is ritual. Aldi is clutter.

In working life this sort of thing would have irritated you. You would have wanted dates, clarity, a sense of control. In retirement, you accept it with the calm resignation of someone who has learned that not everything needs mastering. Some things simply happen to you while you are buying eggs.

So Thursday becomes an anchor. Bin day with extras. A dependable marker in a week that might otherwise dissolve into a beige smear of errands and cups of tea. From the outside it looks ridiculous. From the inside, it is infrastructure.

Retirement, it turns out, does not lack structure. It simply trades deadlines and meetings for quieter rituals. Middle of Lidl Day. Bin day. Parcels that never quite were. The arrival of something you cannot quite remember ordering, or the sudden realisation that you never did.

And somewhere in all this, your shopping budget swells gently, mysteriously, and entirely reasonably, until you are forced to admit that you are now running a small, unacknowledged hardware procurement operation under the cover of groceries.

Still. It’s Thursday.

And it was very good value.