It takes me about
15 minutes to walk into the centre of town from home. On one recent stroll to the shops with some copies of the magazine to post, I was paying more attention than usual to the cars which drove past me. There were a number of reasons for this. One was that I am incurably addicted to any kind of transport, ideally with wheels but essentially anything with an engine will do at a pinch. A second reason was that I had just sold my Herald, and despite taking this drastic step because I wanted to reduce the number of cars in my care, I don’t ever seem able to sell one car without immediately considering a replacement.
This tied into the third reason – for the first time in ages, all three of our children were back home at the same time, only they are no longer children and I simply don’t have anything suitable for carting around five adults plus the odd suitcase or two. So as I strolled along, I was on the lookout for anything interesting enough to pique my interest – bigger than my wife’s Micra but not massive, preferably cheap, and crucially with at least some sort of classic appeal. Unfortunately while some looked cheap and some were a decent size, I didn’t see a single car that looked even vaguely interesting.
In a way, this shouldn’t have been surprising because cars tend to only become interesting in the classic sense when most of them have disappeared from the road, or when they evoke memories that elevate them beyond being simply a means of transport for getting you from one place to another as quickly and efficiently as possible. In both cases, they are then by definition going to be a rare sight on the roads.
This is nothing new. I have lost count of the number of times I’ve heard readers exclaim in wonderment that this car or that car has been elevated to classic status, when the last time they looked it was just classed as an old banger. And cars don’t have to be unusual or advanced in any particular way for this transformation to occur, because usually – given enough time – increasing novelty value will do the trick for even the most mundane of designs. I am sure that in the 1980s I would never have given the Triumph Acclaim a second thought, dismissing it as a piece of modern tat with no character. Nearly 40 years later, I love it!
And that is not an isolated example. One of the cars that potentially fitted my current search criteria was a Volvo 340. Anything more staid and boring would be hard to imagine, but when I first passed my driving test, my parents drove one and they would kindly lend me the keys now and again. At the age of 17 simply driving anything was a thrill, and my memories of the model have nothing to do with style or performance, but revolve around being out with my mates, camping holidays with the family and so on. In some ways the car itself is incidental, but am I the only one who would now turn to watch one drive past on his way to the Post Office? I feel another purchase coming on!