Born a fanatic or made a fanatic?

Let's get something straight from the start. I've always been passionate about classic vehicles.

My mother used to relate that when I was a toddler I'd be able to accurately identify every vehicle on the road, from the rear. Including HGVs and motorcycles. Any opportunity I had, I would want to clamber behind the wheel or handlebars of anything I could inveigle myself into. That's me in the picture below, in a late 1940s Daimler bus, aged six I think, in 1974.

I was bitten by the Airfix bug at an early age and I had hundreds of aircraft, hanging from nylon threads, not just in my bedroom but also in my parents' room and the guest room. Shelves were covered in Airfix, Tamiya and Revell warships, cars and military vehicles and I had a fine collection of Dinky toys, some of which I still own.

One of the most influential moments of my childhood was when my mother took out a subscription to a magazine called Speed and Power. This covered all forms of motorised transport and it not only furthered my already burgeoning knowledge, I'm certain it also fired enough interest in me to convince me that all I wanted to do was be a journalist.

And that is all I've done - I've written for a living for my entire professional life. At one point though it started going badly wrong, or went seriously right, depending on your perspective, and I found myself shifting across into a career in public relations, which eventually led to me establishing my own business. The prime benefit of this was that I could earn a semi-decent living doing what I was good at. The demerit was that this mostly meant writing about things that I often wasn't very interested in.

So I reach this point when I finally want to be able to write about what I want to write about, rather than what somebody else wants me to write for them. There are lots of good reasons for not doing this. There is one very good reason why I shall ignore all of them. I want to.

Happily I've come across some very good people along the way who I can rope into this as it develops. From website experts to photographers to business managers. And we all share one single trait. We were all born fanatics. And so it all starts from here...

Malcolm Cupis