I recently made myself 20 minutes late for a meeting by crawling in the slow lane of the A11 behind a 1969 Dodge Challenger similar to the one in the film Vanishing Point. I still look longingly at old cars, though.
I also drove through a giant puddle not long ago and lost half of my reg plate, making me briefly feel almost as special as someone with a personalised registration but without the expense and mock Georgian house in Surrey.
I do sometimes feel I need a fix of oldness as a I drive it, but cater for this by only cleaning it once a year and only getting its broken bits repaired when I'm really keen to say hello to the nice black labrador at my local garage who often looks after the reception desk for the place's owner. It makes life simpler because, as a vehicle with few ambitions, it asks very little of me. A lot of people say owning a vintage car is showing off but it strikes me that it's actually an act of kindness, since you leave the most fun part of the experience – admiring its exterior while you drive – to others.īeing less generous than that, I instead prefer to drive a small, six-year-old car with no discernible personality.
I always chicken out, though, beset by visions of myself on the hard shoulder, crying and shyly asking a member of the RAC to hold me. I'm often tempted by classic cars, because they suit my delusional fantasy of living in an unrealistically edited version of the early 70s.
I live in a part of rural Britain where many old car drivers are proper old car drivers – septuagenarian men who drive the same Morris Minors they bought when they were 30 – and they'd soon rumble me for a pretender. There's a big difference between an old car you've kept and loved for many years and an old car you've bought recently because it looks cool. I could get another, but that wouldn't be the same. With every passing year, I've become more regretful regarding the moss I allowed to grow up its wheel arches, increasingly chiding of my youthful inability to see it as a minor design classic. I often sighingly refer to it as "the best car I ever had" – partly because it just might be, but also because, as a man over the age of 35, I'm contractually obliged to have a car in my past which I sighingly refer to as "the best car I ever had". Since then, the Corona has taken on mythical status in my mind. It's only since then that I've realised that its tinny MW- and LW-only stereo was significantly responsible for making me admit to myself I far preferred the extrovert rock music of the 70s to its sludgy late-80s and early-90s equivalent, and that, at a time when I was living with my parents, over a mile from the nearest bus stop and several more from my friends, the car itself connected me to the world in a crucial way, taking me through the country lanes that surrounded us, past burned-out Ford Escorts and pheasant-shooting gamekeepers and beyond, towards what I told myself was civilisation.
At that stage of my life I viewed cars largely as stereos on wheels, and the fact that the Toyota had no cassette player on which I could play my Hüsker Dü and Sonic Youth albums made me myopic regarding its plus points. When I part-inherited my grandad's 1976 Toyota Corona in the mid-90s, I showed little appreciation for its astonishingly low mileage or spotless interior.