Do you drive an "old person's car".?
You could say both yes and no. Young drivers in the UK pay heavily for car insurance, the sportier the car, the higher the insurance cost is. That didn't stop my friends from buying older sports cars, usually at the end of the car's days, that being all they could afford. All I wanted was something that was warm, dry and room for a bit of "hanky-panky!" When our neighbour bought a new car I bought his old one. Today that car is referred to as a "Woodie" and it looked like this:
The seats were known as bench seats, they went right across the car, great for hanky-panky. My car was popular because ten young men could squeeze into it, me being their taxi driver for the night out.
Then life sort of got in the way, graduation, marriage, mortgage and all that. A car though, was never a problem, my line of work had a car provided by the company, albeit a dull, boring bog standard yet practical model. The woodie was sold off to one of those friends that squeezed into the car on our night's out. He had trained in car mechanics and now had a garage and fledgling business of his own.
Today this VW Golf is our car, it's the first time that we have ever kept a car for so long, it's twenty-two years old and that 's because it lives in a heated garage with the car that would have had my teenage friends salivating over.
Those friends all liked cars like the MGB, but if you had the money you would be seen in an earlier MG. By that time the MG TC seen here would be well over twenty years old, already classic status.
Now, much later in life and with a few shekels in the bank, I rather fancied one of those early MG TC's, what's more, the lady didn't object, but she did point out that her asthma and open top cars were not a good mix. Fortunately, that friend who had the fledgling garage business was still going strong and by now his grandson was running the business. He told me of an MG model similar to the TC that had a hard top with a sliding sun roof, what's more he knew where there was one for sale. That's how the classic MG came to share garage space with a VW Golf.
Going back to that early woodie. Did my wife, who was then my girlfriend, and I, ahem, indulge in hanky panky? Discretion is the order of the day, I couldn't possibly say, but I can share this anecdote with you. A couple of birthdays ago my shirt collection that my lovely lady makes for me had a new addition. It came with a small note that read: "For memories!" What memories? I will leave that for you to decide. Here's that shirt!
