Steve talks about his personal challenges during our hiatus and shows us his new project, an RV

Andy: Hello everyone. Wersquo;re back with lsquo;Passionate About Carsrsquo; and with Steve. Alright Steve?

Steve: Yeah, hi Andy. Seems to have been a while doesnrsquo;t it?

Andy: Yeah, wersquo;ve been kind of off air ndash; sorry Steve you lead the way. Wersquo;re just going to the back. Wersquo;ve got an exciting project to talk about.

Itrsquo;s kind of my fault and I do apologise wersquo;ve been off air for a year, wersquo;re back now with a vengeance. And the exciting thing is wersquo;ve got a new website, which if yoursquo;re listening to this on the website yoursquo;ll know about because yoursquo;re on it. But if yoursquo;re listening to it on the feed, through iTunes or something like that take a look at passionate-about-cars.com. You donrsquo;t need the www but you can put it there if you want. Thatrsquo;s the new website for hosting this wonderful podcast.

Quite a lot of waterrsquo;s passed under the bridge the year wersquo;ve been off hasnrsquo;t it? Tell us whatrsquo;s been going on.

Steve: Yeah well apart from motor trade, I mean therersquo;s always an awful lot going on in the motor trade ndash; business wise therersquo;s been a fair bit going on.

And personally, I mean, as yoursquo;re aware Andy like I had a little bit of a scare a couple of months ago now, it was a heart attack actually. And it happened here at the garage and I think probably a lot of that will be down to stress of running a business, you know I mean some people might say diet and all this sort of thing like. But I used to smoke; Irsquo;m not a smoker now I gave that up quite a few years ago. Drink wise, no I used to drink years ago, you know in my sort of service days when quite a lot of us used to drink back then. But now therersquo;s really not an awful lot of alcohol passes the lips sohellip; So itrsquo;s not really down to that and the only thing I can put it down to is probably more the stress of running businesses, you know particularly in this day and age. Things get a little bit awkward from time to time.

Therersquo;s an awful lot of things to sort out and whether you like it or not you find yourself getting stressed out and it happens. And I guess it happens to most people that are running businesses as I say particularly at the moment because things are quite sort of tough out there for people.

The heart attack as I say happened here at work. Bit of a strange thing, wasnrsquo;t really what I expected, you know. When people talk about heart attacks the first thing you think about is chest pains. I didnrsquo;t really get chest pains. I had a little bit of what was seen to be a bit of indigestion and I know a lot of people have the same thing leading up to a heart attack. This was a little bit in the morning when I woke up.

One of the main things I noticed at that time, that morning was my shoulders ached, particularly my left shoulder. I put it down to being in the gym. The previous day Irsquo;d had a bit of a workout in the gym and thought may be Irsquo;d overdone it a little bit so I put it down to a little bit of sort of may be muscle strain or something like that. But obviously it wasnrsquo;t and I came into work just feeling a little bit out of sorts, couldnrsquo;t really put your finger on it. Just felt a bit under the weather.

By about sort of quarter past ten that morning I started to feel really nauseous and had to go to the loo in the garage and thought I was going to be bad but I wasnrsquo;t. I then just started sweating profusely. It was like someone threw a bucket of water over me. I was just totally soaked in sweat. Had to sit down and I felt really short of breath then, started struggling to breathe. And I guess I sort of suspected it was something to do with the heart at that time but I didnrsquo;t have the chest pains. So again I was like thinking like I gues...