It all started 30 years earlier, when I was an apprentice plumber. My cousin’s husband, Eddie, asked me to install a gas cooker for them.
As I stood waiting outside on a cold winter evening, wondering what the job would entail, Eddie, who was a bit flash, arrived in his latest car: a 4.2-litre 1968 Jaguar E-type 2+2 in Old English White.
Like most normal teenagers, I appreciated cars but was far from being a ‘car nut’.
I admired Jaguar E-types even though I had never been in one, but the drive with Eddie on that dismal, wintry night through Lincolnshire transformed my view of what a car should be.
This Jaguar E-type S1 3.8’s interior is like new
First, there was the A18, the main road from Grimsby to Doncaster, then the B1207 from Castlethorpe to Winterton.
Long straights were interspersed by varying degrees of bends, all of which simply passed in a dreamlike blur.
I sat there, cosseted in the warm leather, watching the illuminated countryside fly by, thinking that this had to be the most beautiful, sexy, awesome car I had ever seen – and one day I had to own one.
Fast-forward 30 years, and while other things had taken priority, the dream was burning as bright as ever.
This enthusiast’s Jaguar E-type dream began when he was a teenager
