She was a lovely lady beneath the grump. Smoked like a chimney and as if she had to suck the thing to death. There I was without a car back in the early Rooster years. My partner (business rather than pleasure, but a pleasure doing business with him) and I were doing okay and managing our fledgling business quite well. Our only sleepless nights were when we were working due to the demands of the advertising businesses we served. It was the time of the three-day week in the 1970s when the lights went out, for Graham and me, the lights never went out, and the work came in non-stop. We surmised that the lights stayed on as we were near the BBC offices in Shepherd’s Bush and considered vital. That, or they couldn’t find the plug to pull. Our clients ( we prefer that word to customers ) were not so lucky and had to abide by the 3-day week, so our workload benefited.

So we profited from the mayhem in a way. Someone had to do it. We worked hard and long and were doing ok, so okay that we thought we might buy a car. We didn’t really need one, after all, we were in Shepherd’s Bush, not the Outback.

I mentioned it to my dad, and he said that he’d heard that Auntie Mabel was getting rid of her car. My maiden aunt was a good driver, but never went far. “It’s a white Austin 1100,” said my Dad, “you’d have to come north to collect it from her. Looks ok to me, and it’s done very few miles”. My father was very definitely never an expert on cars.

I should have stopped there. We bought it, and always regretted it. Possibly the most unreliable car I’ve ever had the pleasure to meet. One of its major quirks was simply stopping if it rained. It had even had an extra ‘part’ made by Austin to remedy this built-in fault, a sort of flap in front of the engine to divert rainwater away from the engine that came through the front grill.

The beast broke down with monotonous regularity and of course I could never mention it to Mabel. 

In the end, we got rid of it. We did buy another car that was also temperamental in the rain. A battered old 2CV that was an original French version, complete with left hand drive. The doors didn’t lock too well, and it had those lift-up half windows that sort of flapped open if you drove more than 15 miles an hour. The rain issue was again a leak. It didn’t affect its performance or stop the engine , but any rain sent a constant drip of icy water onto the driver’s right accelerator ankle. So it sort of stopped the car with an unsophisticated form of torture for the driver.

Unlike my Auntie Mabel’s 1100 I loved this little car and frequently drove around London in it, with a failsafe method of getting around Hyde Park corner and Marble Arch using the peripheral Frenchman vision method thus: Drive like everyone else as fast as possible, on reaching aforementioned roundabout take on the persona of a Frenchman and keep the head held high and the view forward using peripheral vision to look for traffic from the right. Traffic from the right will see a small battered French car with what appears to be a French driver with no care for his vehicle hurtling towards the roundabout and will allow this car to whizz through thus avoiding damage to one’s own car and a small international incident. Worked for me!

We used to park the car on the streets of Shepherds Bush outside where we lived and to add to its security we bought the car a Crooklock. Didn’t want just anyone making off with our fine vehicle. Its vehicle security was non existent, the door never worth locking.

On the way out to the car one morning, I got into the car and found to my disgust that some villain had made of with…our crooklock.

We eventually sold the car for half what it cost us: thirty quid! I put a notice in the window the car saying that it obviosly needed to be taken into care, and the ad worked perfectly.

Everybody happy.

Footnote here:

Seems I repeated myself here on the first posting. I was trying out some new tech and it got the better of me. Hopefully I have this right now.