Having recently returned to the UK after many years abroad, I find myself in a strange and disconcerting situation – I’m currently without classic wheels. If I’m to retain any credibility in the C&SC office, this is obviously something that needs to be resolved.
My last steed – a very early Citroën Dyane – was so quintessentially French that to remove it from its natural habitat would have been akin to ridding the country of undercooked meat, endless strikes and smelly cheese. With its faded beige paint, black numberplates and yellow headlights I really should have been sponsored by the French Tourist Office to park it in a sleepy village somewhere, so, as far as I was concerned, bringing it to England was never on the cards.
Instead, as a reformed Francophile (I much prefer Germany these days) I left it in a barn in Normandy for some lucky tourist to discover. After 40-odd years on a French farm it’s unlikely that it would have come close to passing an MoT test anyway, so I probably did myself a favour there.
Being someone who would happily own almost anything on condition that it was built before the mid-seventies, you would think that coming up with a shortlist of candidates with which replace the Dyane would be an easy enough task.
