I really envy those enthusiasts who can browse old magazines and not pay attention to the prices for cars. I simply can't rationalise them like some people can.
If I see a Ferrari GTO advertised for £3000, I cry a little. It doesn't matter that when that advert was run in the mid-1960s, £3k might have bought you a row of cottages in South Ascot, I still weep.
Then there are the others, the hyper-rational who, regardless of the whole price thing, never visit my world of regret, and never rue their missed opportunities. And that's just not normal.
Rightly or wrongly, classics are an emotional business for me and I don't at all envy those for whom they are not – I bet they are better mechanics than me, but I wouldn't want that sense of total detachment.
How could I not wish that 10 years ago I didn't borrow £20,000 instead of £10,000 to transform the purchase of a Westfield Eleven into the purchase of a Lotus Eleven? My salary was depressingly similar to what it is now so the level of debt would have made very little difference.
Neither is it that I have any qualms about any of the classics I have owned, but (as I have bleated many a time), I am very greedy and therefore forever tortured by the hundreds that I haven't had, and especially the scores of "must-have" cars that due to the booming market, I now know that I never will.
Of course the GTO is an extreme example that the rationalisers tend to quote, but it doesn't mean that my irrational approach isn't (slightly more) justified if we look at more recent trends.
