Upwardly mobile

I particularly enjoyed your improbable pairing of the Citroën GS Pallas and the Vanden Plas 1.7

(C&SC, September), because I had made a vaguely similar comparison in a letter that the late lamented Bill Boddy thought fit to publish in

Motor Sport in the early 1970s.

I was in transition from a 1934 3½-litre Bentley to a ’54 Lanchester Dauphin with a Daimler radiator shell, having bought the latter before selling the former, and my then wife drove a 1951 Barkerbodied Lanchester 10. We had friends with a new Citroën. After a slightly queasy outing with them in their GS, I compared it unfavourably with the comfortable, but admittedly leisurely, Lanchester.

A few years later, I was tempted for a while to swap my Daimler for a new pea-green Vanden Plas that had been standing for too long in Byatt’s Garage in Stoke-on-trent. I recovered from that phase and remained with Daimlers, but might be tempted again when I approach my Zimmer-frame years. Roderick Ramage

Coppenhall, Stafford

These luxury compacts are as interesting as they are quirky, reckons Ramage