Spending my days putting

Classics Monthly together and most of my free time of an evening and at weekends in the garage, I think it is fair to say that I live and breathe classic cars. Naturally I have my own personal favourites, but I can’t really think of any car from the 1980s or before that I wouldn’t like to try. Yet despite this, I have always maintained that if you stand back and look at the hobby dispassionately, then it makes little sense to try and keep a car in shape and on the road for many decades when it had an original design life of just eight or ten years.

Increasingly though, I am less and less sure this is the case. It is invariably true that tailpipe emissions from a classic will be higher than they are for a modern car of a similar class, assuming both are kept in good condition. However, building new cars has a huge environmental impact, especially if they are powered by batteries. And quite aside from the bodyshell and drivetrain, what about the massive amount of gear that is considered essential these days – air conditioning, electric windows all round and huge touch screen infotainment centres (and what a horrible word that is!) to name just a few. Where do people think the resources come from to make those? Heck, I often see bloated school run SUVs parked outside my house, and most of them have a button that is pressed for the tailgate to be automatically closed, so saving the driver from having to reach up and exert any physical effort – that will be yet another electric motor and some more cabling, then...

However, I really want to dwell here today more on the emotional connection we have with classics rather than the environmental one, important though that is. Despite loving my classics, I rarely get too emotionally attached to any particular one and I never give them names.

So when I sold my beige Acclaim this month, I was a little surprised at how sad I felt to see it go. Then I reflected on all that we had done together in the last five years. Perhaps a personal highlight was driving down to the Dolomites in Italy with my brother Paul – that’s us pictured above at the top of the Passo di Sella. I taught two of my three children to drive in the Acclaim, and they even passed their driving tests in it. And that’s when it occurred to me that this may have been just another car to have passed through my hands, but on the way it had inveigled its way into so many family memories.

Now don’t worry because I am not planning on getting all maudlin about seeing the Acclaim go. I’m sure we will all get over it and move on, but it did make me wonder not only if any of you had experienced something similar (as I am sure so many of you must have done), but whether you did something about it. Have you, for example, tracked down a car that you used to own and bought it back? And if so, did the experience live up to the expectations, or was it a case of some memories being better off left as memories? Please do write and let us know.