by A London diarist meets a Tesla enthusiast at a party in Clapham and learns that rocket thrusters cannot make up for a personality still in pre-production
Saturday, 24 October 2026. Brockley. Back from a house party in Clapham, shoes in hand, chips in the other, 1.20am.
A Party Where Every Conversation Became About A Car
Priya’s colleague Hattie had a birthday party tonight in a flat in Clapham with exposed brick, a fiddle-leaf fig and a framed print that said Live Laugh Leave Early. I went because Hattie promised there would be a cheese board. There was a cheese board. There was also a man named Rufus.
Rufus works in something called growth at a fintech company in Old Street. Within four minutes of meeting me he had told me he had put down a deposit on the new Tesla Roadster. If you missed it, the report on how Elon Musk unveiled the flying Tesla Roadster nine years late explains that it can hop over a row of cars on compressed air thrusters, drive upside down and do nought to sixty in about a second, and that production is expected to start in 2028.
He Has Paid For A Car With No Price
I asked Rufus how much the car cost. He said it does not have a price yet. I asked how much he had paid. He said a deposit. I asked when he would get it. He said 2028, probably. I asked what he would do until then. He said he would think about it. He said this with the face other people use for describing a baby.
The report has a quote from a customer who says he paid fifty thousand dollars for the opportunity to find out how much more money he would eventually be asked to pay. I told Rufus about this. He laughed and said that was exactly it, as if it were a compliment. I realised, holding a cracker with a small piece of brie on it, that I was talking to the most optimistic man in South London.
The Daily Mash Was Right, I Am Sorry To Say
On the night bus home I read the Daily Mash take, in which Tesla unveiled a new way to identify the worst people in a traffic jam, namely a car that briefly hops over everyone else while belching a plume of gas. I want to be fair to Rufus. He was not the worst person. He was kind to Hattie’s cat. He offered me the last stuffed vine leaf. He just had the energy of a man who believes that a car that flies for four seconds will fix his personality, and it will not, because his personality is also in pre-production.
Every Party Has A Rufus
Every London party has a Rufus. Sometimes he has a Roadster deposit. Sometimes he has crypto. Once, at a party in Hackney, he had a sourdough starter that he said was older than me, which as far as I could tell was meant to be romantic. The common element is that he wants you to be impressed by something that has not happened yet. That is not a date. That is a pitch deck with cheekbones.
Meanwhile The Maths Boys Are Having A Moment
There was also a man at the party who studied maths at Imperial, and he was being followed around by two girls who had clearly seen one particular mathematician on Celebrity Traitors and assumed every mathematician would be equally glamorous. The Daily Mash covered exactly this tragedy in its report on men disappointed that not all mathematicians are hot. At Hattie’s party it was the reverse. The girls were not disappointed. The maths boy was lovely. He explained probability to me using the cheese board, and I understood it for the first time since Year Ten.
I would like to report that I went home with the maths boy’s number. I did not. He was very nice, but he left at ten to catch the last train to Guildford, which, after the dinner party report I read this week, is apparently the single most British way to end any social occasion.
What I Learned In Clapham
Firstly, the flying car is not the problem. The flying car is fun. If somebody gives me a go in one, I will scream and enjoy it. The problem is building a whole identity around a thing that arrives in 2028, when there is a perfectly good bus that arrives in four minutes and has a seat at the back where you can eat chips.
Secondly, the most attractive thing anyone said all night was the maths boy telling me the chance of the cheese board running out before midnight was ninety-two percent and I should take the good brie now. That is a man who can see the future. Rufus can only pay for it in advance.
Thirdly, and I say this with love for everyone at that party, nobody in London actually needs a car that can fly over traffic. What we need is traffic that moves, buses that turn up when the app says they will, and a Northern line that does not stop between Clapham Common and Stockwell for nine minutes while the driver apologises for a signal failure in a voice that suggests he has also given up. Rufus could hop over all of it. The rest of us will be underneath, on the bus, eating our chips and watching him run out of compressed air above a branch of Iceland.
Chips finished. Shoes still in hand. Priya is asleep on the sofa with a party hat on. The Roadster will land in 2028. The N171 night bus landed in nineteen minutes. I know which vehicle I trust.
