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Bought this with about 80k on the clock. Family cheer down to the big 100,000. Looked good on day 1, but got broken into, then bumped into in the work carpark and all downhill from there. Formally got written off after the bump, so was worth zero. Deteriorated at the end. Booked it in for MOT + Service. I phoned garage at 11am and he said, "I got the results of your MOT, and I cancelled the service!" Nuff said. Couldn't drive it away from the garage.
Had its day though, this was the only car in the Cotswolds to make it up the Andoversford hill on the day it snowed at 5pm. We drove along the top of the Cotswold ridge in glorious, isolated, triumph!
Sigh, so many memories. After the break in the alarm went off intermittently, day and night, for the next year or so, until I picked up a filler part for the door from a breaker's yard somewhere. Oh, the joy of getting up at 3 in the morning to unlock the car so that I could go back to sleep. I remember locking it in a car park once and the sodding alarm just wouldn't stop. I unlocked and relocked and nothing happened. In the end I just locked it from my jacket pocket from 10 yards away and then stood with other people tutting and shaking my head before walking away.
And there was the door handle. On a very cold day the driver's door wouldn't open, so I said, "Stand Back!," and gave a mighty hank on the handle. There I stood, door still closed, holding the handle in my hand feeling slightly foolish. After that the handle would come right off if you were even slightly robust opening the door. You could generally get it back in in a minute or two by manouvering it carefully into place and giving it a thump. I double parked to let someone out once and off it came with a queue of traffic behind. I had to stand there and do all this delicate pushing into place while other driver's all waited.
And there was the lock. In Tescos Car Park the central locking just gave out and locked the car while I was in it. I smiled a bit and unlocked it, and it just locked again immediately. I smiled again and did it again and it did it again. I smiled slightly more tensely now and had an idea. I opened the window and unlocked manually from the outside. Clever huh?! It immediately locked again. Not smiling now. I could not get that sodding car unlocked. I was in Tescos car park and could not get out of the sodding car. People were looking now. I frowned, had to actually drive off and drive to the garage. They could fix it, but I still couldn't actually get out of the car to get them to help me. In the end I sat in the garage forecourt and had to shout across to another customer who was just leaving, "Err, Hello!, HELLO!, err, hi there, err, this sounds a bit embarassing but could you, err,....." They got there in the end, and finally I could get out of the damned thing.
Oh I miss that car........