My life in cars. A nostalgia Trip.
I had to take my Smart car for its first ever service this morning, and as I sat in the pounding Manchester rush hour traffic, getting lost as my route was unexpectedly shut, I began to ponder cars. I have always loved cars and always loved driving, preferably in something small and fast, or failing that, big and fast.....nothing original there then!
I was feeling nostalgic about all the cars I have driven in my seventeen years as a careful lady driver and tried to remember cars past and cars loved and cars tolerated.
This structureless ramble is a trawl through my automotive memory. There are links to photos, pretty crappy photos on the whole, and a few proved too difficult to find, so I gave up!
The very first car I remember was my parents blue Citroen. It was one of those classically shaped ones, not one the massive ones, but the more modest style, I was five and I can still remember the registration number which is remarkable considering I don’t know the reg number of my current car! Using this remembered reg number I have, through judicious use of interweb, discovered the exact model - GS CONFORT 1015 and a photo! Of my parents, mum was always the main driver as my father is officially the worst driver in the universe and caused great stress to mum and myself as well as every other driver on the road and poor unsuspecting passenger with us quaking in the car. These days he lives in central London and hasn't been behind a wheel for years and years no doubt extending his lifespan by decades!
Mum then started to get company cars, and rather like the lovely new Ford Capri - I was aged from about 6 to 13 for this three Capri owning era, and I liked them very much. Then mum was promoted and we had three 3 series BMWs which lasted until I was 18 or so, I wasn't too keen on these until I was able to drive the final one myself when I was having lessons and when I had passed my test.
That was when I had my very first car all to myself! We were in the process of planning our move from London to Manchester and my (now ex) step father said that he would help to find me a good first car, he used his ‘numerous contacts’ in Manchester (i.e went to a garage owned by a friend) and turned up at our house in London one weekend with a rather nice year old, black Fiat Uno, which served me very well all the way through my foundation course in London and then through my degree in Stoke on Trent, so it zoomed up and down the M6 a few times and I loved it! It was wonderful to have a car as a student, it really made life easier for me and I particularly liked to escape the post-industrial murk of Stoke and head for the Staffordshire and Derbyshire hills and drive as fast as I could with loud jazz blasting……pretentious; moi?
Then I met Peter in 1994 after I had been out of university (broke and unemployed, living in South Manchester with mum and still in my Uno) and he drove a fantastic beast of a car, the beautifully understated Saab 900s Turbo which he had owned for about two years (just one in a long line of Saabs) and loved it. I found it hard to drive at first as it was so heavy and totally different to any car I had driven at that point but it went like shit off a shovel and I came to adore it and it's sexy noise! We moved in together fairly swiftly and he bought me a brand new Golf GTI which was serious fun as we lived in the sticks of Cheshire and there were lots of county lanes to play on. We always drove each others cars, and would swap round for days at a time, which is always fun. We had a long trip round Ireland when I first had the Golf, it misbehaved itself all the time and as soon as we came home, it was in the garage for about three weeks while they tried to mend it. Somewhere in all this, I had a Fiat Cinquento, for the life of me I can’t remember when or why, but it was really basic and against all the odds I loved it!
We kept the Saab for years until things started to go wrong and it looked like it needed some serious renovation, so reluctantly, we sold it to a Saab fanatic friend who lives locally, so we see it around from time to time, which is nice. I’m really struggling to remember what came next for me, I think I took over the Saab as my full time car and Peter turned up one night with the brand new Mercedes SLK which was about the most fun I think we have had with a car. We attracted so much attention in it, as it was such an innovation at the time - we quite often ended up demonstrating the roof opening and closing at traffic lights for Taxi and Van drivers. We drove to Tuscany in it in August 1999 - we got to Modena in one day and were sipping Prosecco under the trees at our farmhouse by lunchtime the next day! The only problem with using it for a driving holiday was the small boot, if the roof was up then the boot was a decent size, but with the roof down, it was rather small, but we did manage to squeeze some Italian goodies in for the drive home, but not much - there was only room for 12 bottles of wine, all laid out flat in the little dip in the floor of the boot, one Armani sheepskin jacket plus the things we arrived with.
The SLK was firmly mine by this point (I think Peter had a Golf V6 at that time, which was great fun too). We eventually stumbled into yet another financial crisis which meant that Sarah had to get rid of her car again and I can assure you that I and I didn't want to give it up! But there was no other option and I settled for the brand new Audi A2 which was quite a nice little car although I confess to sulking desperately as is certainly wasn't what I wanted to be driving! There was also a Fiat Punto which came with a job I had for five minutes, it was the first of the new shape, and it was really dull. Although as you can tell, I do have rather a penchant for Fiats for some reason!
Peter kept his Golf V6 and then much to my horror one day came home driving a hideous Range Rover Westminster. I hate 4 wheel drive cars and especially Range Rovers; this was the last model before the big re-styling. It was slow, cumbersome and gobbled petrol like nothing I had ever seen - I did like being high up though and it was the first time we had used Satellite Navigation which we loved. It lasted for all of three months!
Then Peter turned up with a totally fantastic car (bear in mind, that I had had to get rid of my wonderful car as it cost too much to run) - the (yet again, brad new model) BMW 7 series. What a stunner! Despite the trickiness of having to learn a totally new way of driving we took to it like ducks to water. It was big, very big and had so many goodies in it, including a TV and chilled storage compartments that we found excuses to go on many long drives. We took it to Spain for two weeks and covered 5,000 miles at up to 130 mph. Wonderful. But it kept going wrong and not starting and jumping up and down, it went back to BMW twelve times in just over a year and eventually Peter got fed up with it and managed to get a wodge of cash out of BMW to put towards another car. For the next car he chose the horrible BMW X3, I really would have thought that he’d have learned his lesson from the Range Rover, but no such luck. It was a bit better, a bit more like a car than a van and it was very useful when we were moving house and Peter was moving office as it could carry a serious amount of stuff. We took it to the West Coast of Ireland for Xmas 2004 and our poor friends suffered so much bouncing along in the back that we promised them that we’d get rid of it.
So next up Peter decided on yet another re-modelled car, the new style Mercedes A class which he thought was suitably modest for someone just starting a new business and stylish enough not to scare his clients off. It was small, cheap to run, very comfy and we loved it. At the same time, Peter’s son bought my Audi off me for £5k and I got my Smart Car. Despite my love of fast powerful cars, I have always really wanted a Smart as I adore tiny cars and at home, we could park both cars in our one parking space which made us very happy!
I do practically no mileage at all (5,000 a year is my current range!) where as Peter has done almost 30,000 by the time the A Class was a year old. So yet again, he changed cars without telling me and turned up about three months ago in a Mercedes C Class, V6 3L another very fast car. I didn’t like it at first, but it’s grown on me and its great to drive, really powerful and wonderfully fast. It’s got sat nav, but it’s not as good as BMWs. Now we don’t fit in the same parking space……
There are also the ones which got away - the new style Porsche 911 which we fell in love with in Scotland and the bank wouldn’t give us the money for! We ordered the Audi TT when it was first out and you had to order them about two years in advance, ours finally arrived at the garage just as it was getting bad press about flipping over on bends at speeds of over 50mph, and this put Peter off, so I drove it once around the garage car park, in the dark, in the rain, still in it’s wrappers and then we said “goodbye” to it. Very sad…..
That all sounds quite complicated - we seem to have got through quite a number of cars in 12 years! I wonder what will be next.
I was feeling nostalgic about all the cars I have driven in my seventeen years as a careful lady driver and tried to remember cars past and cars loved and cars tolerated.
This structureless ramble is a trawl through my automotive memory. There are links to photos, pretty crappy photos on the whole, and a few proved too difficult to find, so I gave up!
The very first car I remember was my parents blue Citroen. It was one of those classically shaped ones, not one the massive ones, but the more modest style, I was five and I can still remember the registration number which is remarkable considering I don’t know the reg number of my current car! Using this remembered reg number I have, through judicious use of interweb, discovered the exact model - GS CONFORT 1015 and a photo! Of my parents, mum was always the main driver as my father is officially the worst driver in the universe and caused great stress to mum and myself as well as every other driver on the road and poor unsuspecting passenger with us quaking in the car. These days he lives in central London and hasn't been behind a wheel for years and years no doubt extending his lifespan by decades!
Mum then started to get company cars, and rather like the lovely new Ford Capri - I was aged from about 6 to 13 for this three Capri owning era, and I liked them very much. Then mum was promoted and we had three 3 series BMWs which lasted until I was 18 or so, I wasn't too keen on these until I was able to drive the final one myself when I was having lessons and when I had passed my test.
That was when I had my very first car all to myself! We were in the process of planning our move from London to Manchester and my (now ex) step father said that he would help to find me a good first car, he used his ‘numerous contacts’ in Manchester (i.e went to a garage owned by a friend) and turned up at our house in London one weekend with a rather nice year old, black Fiat Uno, which served me very well all the way through my foundation course in London and then through my degree in Stoke on Trent, so it zoomed up and down the M6 a few times and I loved it! It was wonderful to have a car as a student, it really made life easier for me and I particularly liked to escape the post-industrial murk of Stoke and head for the Staffordshire and Derbyshire hills and drive as fast as I could with loud jazz blasting……pretentious; moi?
Then I met Peter in 1994 after I had been out of university (broke and unemployed, living in South Manchester with mum and still in my Uno) and he drove a fantastic beast of a car, the beautifully understated Saab 900s Turbo which he had owned for about two years (just one in a long line of Saabs) and loved it. I found it hard to drive at first as it was so heavy and totally different to any car I had driven at that point but it went like shit off a shovel and I came to adore it and it's sexy noise! We moved in together fairly swiftly and he bought me a brand new Golf GTI which was serious fun as we lived in the sticks of Cheshire and there were lots of county lanes to play on. We always drove each others cars, and would swap round for days at a time, which is always fun. We had a long trip round Ireland when I first had the Golf, it misbehaved itself all the time and as soon as we came home, it was in the garage for about three weeks while they tried to mend it. Somewhere in all this, I had a Fiat Cinquento, for the life of me I can’t remember when or why, but it was really basic and against all the odds I loved it!
We kept the Saab for years until things started to go wrong and it looked like it needed some serious renovation, so reluctantly, we sold it to a Saab fanatic friend who lives locally, so we see it around from time to time, which is nice. I’m really struggling to remember what came next for me, I think I took over the Saab as my full time car and Peter turned up one night with the brand new Mercedes SLK which was about the most fun I think we have had with a car. We attracted so much attention in it, as it was such an innovation at the time - we quite often ended up demonstrating the roof opening and closing at traffic lights for Taxi and Van drivers. We drove to Tuscany in it in August 1999 - we got to Modena in one day and were sipping Prosecco under the trees at our farmhouse by lunchtime the next day! The only problem with using it for a driving holiday was the small boot, if the roof was up then the boot was a decent size, but with the roof down, it was rather small, but we did manage to squeeze some Italian goodies in for the drive home, but not much - there was only room for 12 bottles of wine, all laid out flat in the little dip in the floor of the boot, one Armani sheepskin jacket plus the things we arrived with.
The SLK was firmly mine by this point (I think Peter had a Golf V6 at that time, which was great fun too). We eventually stumbled into yet another financial crisis which meant that Sarah had to get rid of her car again and I can assure you that I and I didn't want to give it up! But there was no other option and I settled for the brand new Audi A2 which was quite a nice little car although I confess to sulking desperately as is certainly wasn't what I wanted to be driving! There was also a Fiat Punto which came with a job I had for five minutes, it was the first of the new shape, and it was really dull. Although as you can tell, I do have rather a penchant for Fiats for some reason!
Peter kept his Golf V6 and then much to my horror one day came home driving a hideous Range Rover Westminster. I hate 4 wheel drive cars and especially Range Rovers; this was the last model before the big re-styling. It was slow, cumbersome and gobbled petrol like nothing I had ever seen - I did like being high up though and it was the first time we had used Satellite Navigation which we loved. It lasted for all of three months!
Then Peter turned up with a totally fantastic car (bear in mind, that I had had to get rid of my wonderful car as it cost too much to run) - the (yet again, brad new model) BMW 7 series. What a stunner! Despite the trickiness of having to learn a totally new way of driving we took to it like ducks to water. It was big, very big and had so many goodies in it, including a TV and chilled storage compartments that we found excuses to go on many long drives. We took it to Spain for two weeks and covered 5,000 miles at up to 130 mph. Wonderful. But it kept going wrong and not starting and jumping up and down, it went back to BMW twelve times in just over a year and eventually Peter got fed up with it and managed to get a wodge of cash out of BMW to put towards another car. For the next car he chose the horrible BMW X3, I really would have thought that he’d have learned his lesson from the Range Rover, but no such luck. It was a bit better, a bit more like a car than a van and it was very useful when we were moving house and Peter was moving office as it could carry a serious amount of stuff. We took it to the West Coast of Ireland for Xmas 2004 and our poor friends suffered so much bouncing along in the back that we promised them that we’d get rid of it.
So next up Peter decided on yet another re-modelled car, the new style Mercedes A class which he thought was suitably modest for someone just starting a new business and stylish enough not to scare his clients off. It was small, cheap to run, very comfy and we loved it. At the same time, Peter’s son bought my Audi off me for £5k and I got my Smart Car. Despite my love of fast powerful cars, I have always really wanted a Smart as I adore tiny cars and at home, we could park both cars in our one parking space which made us very happy!
I do practically no mileage at all (5,000 a year is my current range!) where as Peter has done almost 30,000 by the time the A Class was a year old. So yet again, he changed cars without telling me and turned up about three months ago in a Mercedes C Class, V6 3L another very fast car. I didn’t like it at first, but it’s grown on me and its great to drive, really powerful and wonderfully fast. It’s got sat nav, but it’s not as good as BMWs. Now we don’t fit in the same parking space……
There are also the ones which got away - the new style Porsche 911 which we fell in love with in Scotland and the bank wouldn’t give us the money for! We ordered the Audi TT when it was first out and you had to order them about two years in advance, ours finally arrived at the garage just as it was getting bad press about flipping over on bends at speeds of over 50mph, and this put Peter off, so I drove it once around the garage car park, in the dark, in the rain, still in it’s wrappers and then we said “goodbye” to it. Very sad…..
That all sounds quite complicated - we seem to have got through quite a number of cars in 12 years! I wonder what will be next.