TURNING J

The great unanswerable question is why so many of us, me included, buy cars that we end up loathing? It’s like a bad marriage, it starts off exhilarating — you are in love — and then, as time passes, disappointment mounts and you realise it can only end in a bitter, rancorous divorce.

Usually the bile starts to rise when the cars begin to cost us money in repairs, often the product of a breakdown in some particularly horrible remote location. If they do fail in the city it is when it is absolutely vital that it should be going because you are running late for a very important date. Then the breakdowns and faults settle into a downward spiral, from which there is no recovery.

The danger sign for me is when the local garage owner starts giving me bottles of wine for Christmas because I have become such a valued customer. Time to sack the car. Again.

My problem is, I buy utterly unsuitable vehicles. Flash European ones.

This is because, in my childhood, my father bought a succession of some of the most embarrassing cars possible. He started with a 1950s Ford Prefect that could barely make the summit of the Albany hill. Often it didn’t and he would retreat to the pub at the bottom to nurse his humili- ation with a beer. These were the days before drink drive commercials and the breathalyser changed our behaviour patterns but I now understand his automotive angst and need for a soothing ale.

Eventually he replaced the battered Prefect with an early 1960s Vauxhall Victor, a grotesque lumpy looking thing because its English designers had got carried away with the fins and bulging chrome glamour of Detroit and pimped it up hideously.

Finally Dad tired of it and moved on