If, like me, or if indeed, like my four year old, you see life through the eyes of a four year old, then today, I lived the dream. Just imagine, if you will, the biggest vehicle you could possibly think of, then imagine yourself at the wheel. That in a nutshell was what I did today. Somebody paid me to drive a Volvo wheel loader back and forth, round and round, lifting the scoop up and down. That’s a machine that weighs twenty nine (TWENTY NINE!!) tonnes!! The scoop at the front is bigger than the average car and the wheels were as tall as me. If you look closely at the picture below, I am the small object in the blue hat.
I was met at the train station in Eskilstuna and whisked away to a secret location, through some padlocked gates through some woods and into a clearing which was home to a massive test track. I was there to make a short informational film about a secret piece of Volvo Wheel Loader technology, that I cannot disclose here. Every so often another equally large machine would whizz past in the near distance and me and the camera crew were told in no uncertain terms that we had definitely not seen what we had just seen.
I’m not a huge fan of Clarkson and co, in fact, I think I fall more into the Stewart Lee school of Top Gear appreciation, however… when it comes to playing with a TWENTY NINE TONNE (!!) wheel loader at high speed round the track while recording pieces to camera, I think I was able to come to terms with my inner Hamster.
