Long live the Discovery!
Dave’s Disco passes another MOT – and he celebrates with a greenlane butterfly safari through Northamptonshire
IT HAS been a good year for MOT tests, for me. Following hot on the wheels of my 32-year-old Ninety’s success at the test station, my 22-year-old Discovery also passed its MOT with flying colours. The 300Tdi automatic has been my everyday runaround for 12 years now and it has done me proud.
Yes, it has had the usual Disco 1 rust issues, but nothing a bit of welding hasn’t solved. Three times in the last dozen years I have had to spend a few hundred pounds on welding: total cost about £1000. If I was a competent welder and had been able to do the work myself, it would have been even cheaper, of course. To keep such a reliable car on the road for all these years, that’s nothing.
My Disco has been remarkably dependable and done everything I’ve asked of it. It cost me less than £6000 when I bought it in 2006. If I had bought a new Discovery I would have lost that much in depreciation in its first year.
It really annoys me when you hear our inept politicians talking about getting older cars off the roads – usually on environmental grounds. What a load of bollocks. Keeping old cars like my Discovery on the road is the ultimate in recycling, because it saves the enormous environmental cost of disposing of an old car and building a new one.
But, more importantly, I wonder how many otherwise brilliant Discovery 1s have been consigned to the scrapyard because their owners were reluctant to pay for a bit of welding when rust appeared? Hundreds of thousands, that’s how many. Oh yes, I know it has been a big bonus for Defender fans, because it has maintained a steady supply of excellent secondhand Tdi engines from those condemned Discoverys; I took advantage of this when I upgraded my 1984 Ninety with a Tdi conversion a couple of years back, using the 300Tdi engine and R380 gearbox from a Disco Commercial, but that doesn’t alter the fact that so many Discoverys have had their lives terminated prematurely when they could have provided many more years of sterling service.
Life is a precious thing – something that has been brought home to me in recent weeks by my elderly mother, who has been very poorly. This means both the Disco and Ninety have been pressed into regular service for trips to see her in Norfolk. I’ve got a lovely old photo of my mum with me aged about three with a little friend in a wooden pedal car (bottom right). I’m the one picking his nose.
My recent travels have also taken me to Lincolnshire, where I went to interview a woman who grows blooms for the cut flower market. Her name is Carol Godfrey and photographing her in the middle of ten acres of peonies was quite an experience. It was also quite a coincidence, because it turned out I knew Carol more than 35 years ago when she worked as an assistant in my local camera shop. Small world. And I’m
pleased to say that she and her husband David drive a 300Tdi Discovery, too!
Their farm lies alongside the banks of the tidal River Nene, so I couldn’t resist a detour to the estuary near Sutton Bridge, where it meets the sea at the Wash. There, at the mouth of the river, stand two old lighthouses, now private residences. Amusingly, one was flying a Union Jack, the other a European Union flag. No other neighbours for miles around and they still can’t agree on that most pressing of political issues.
Later I drove the 60 or so miles upstream to my home in Northamptonshire, close to the more placid middle reaches of the Nene. Here we’ve had a succession of misty mornings followed by blazing hot days. There are plenty of folk here enjoying the weather and the river by taking to their boats. I can’t blame them.
There are also some large tracts of woodland here; remains of the great Rockingham Forest of the Middle Ages. Deep within those woods lives one of the country’s rarest butterflies, the magnificent Purple Emperor, and I’ve promised my neighbours David and Sandra that I would take them there to see one for the first time. It’s a long trek, but it’s made easier by me taking us halfway there by negotiating a greenlane in the Discovery.
The only other people we meet are fellow butterfly enthusiasts from all over the country who had made the pilgrimage to catch a glimpse of the country’s second-biggest and most colourful butterfly. We aren’t disappointed: the sunny weather has brought several out to play and a couple even land on the track, so that we can photograph them. In truth, it is a red letter day for butterfly spotting, with dozens of magnificent Silver-washed Fritillaries also on the wing, along with white admirals and more common Small Tortoiseshells and the like.
We bounce back down the greenlane, grinning from ear to ear. It’s been a great morning, made even more special by knowing that while some folk spend thousands of pounds to seek out wildlife halfway across the globe, we’ve just enjoyed an amazing butterfly safari on our doorstep. The Discovery, as ever, has been my passport to adventure.