1994 ROVER 216 SLi AUTOMATIC
My £100 Rover has performed faultlessly during regular lockdown trips to the supermarket which were the only car journeys I made for weeks.
Even though the car is 26 years old and undoubtedly a timeless and much-loved classic, even I have to admit that the sight of a tatty red 1990s Rover did little to bring a smile behind the face masks of shoppers queuing in the rain.
Sadly, my Austin Cambridge was still locked down in a lock-up that I couldn’t access, and my Austin Maestro is still awaiting some paint work.
My Rover 75 now has an MoT, too, though there seemed little point in taxing it, so L120 JVH became top transport and enjoyed my first post lockdown trip of any significance – to Braintree in Essex, where it was photographed with a another red vehicle from a company once part of British Leyland… a 1975 former London Transport DM class Daimler Fleetline double-decker bus.
Without resorting to clichés, this part of the country does seem to have a disproportionate number of wildly driven premium-brand SUVs whose owners have little regard for Rover motorists.
On the way back I called in at a justre-opened motorway services, now a fascinatingly dystopian world of cordons, ordering food on a touch screen, receiving it from behind a plastic screen and unusual arrangements in the gents.
Another photographic mission to Dunstable meant that I could take the car back to its former home of St Neots in Cambridgeshire where I photographed it at its original supplying dealer, specifically Marshalls.
Finally, it was time to take the big risk that I’d been putting off for days. Will it? Won’t it? And what if it gets stuck? Oh what the heck, let’s do it. And yes, joy of joys, the sunroof still works!