Mrs P wasn’t happy – in fact, she was perfectly annoyed at the fact that for the first time in years, she couldn’t take part in one of her favourite activities: poking around an old scrapyard.
As we stood at the entrance of our ‘regular’ haunt, she clocked the sign which banned children from entering and realised that that probably meant she couldn’t go any further with an eight-month-old in her arms. With regret, she waved the rest of us on and stood, like a martyr, just beyond the gate.
Of course, my eldest and I didn’t dwell for too long on our rising guilt and scrambled across the remains of motoring history in search of something else with which to clutter up the garage. For once there were no Minis from which to pillage parts, but we did come across a good variety of down-at-heel classics.
Two Triumph TR7s, a Rover P6, Austin Princess, Rover SD1 and a Fiat X19. I stood by the side of a chassis for far too long, thinking that it looked familiar before realising that it was from a Land-Rover, but the discovery of the day was a fibreglass shell that appeared to be from a Reliant Sabre – ironic considering as two days later I would take ownership of my very own Reliant.
It took some head-scratching back in the office to identify one particular mangled wreck – we reckon it’s a Fiat 1100 which has definitely seen better days.
