In the first twenty to thirty years of our marriage we misguidedly bought British car after British car. None of them lasted more than five years without either, the big bills or the beckoning of the knackers yard. We gullibly traded it in only to repeat the stupidity time and again. Then we bought a BMW. What a fabulous, reliable car. It took a good ten years before the big bills happened, that's when I knew it would be seriously expensive to keep it running.
"A Golf will do," my lady said. The garage where we bought the BMW gave us a fair offer on our car and as they had a Golf on their forecourt that was less than a year old with just under ten thousand miles on it, and being just over five grand cheaper than a brand new one, we went for it. That was in the year 2,000, that same Golf is still our daily runabout, with 210,000 miles on the clock. Admittedly it has lived in a heated garage with a vintage MG for most of it's life when it's not ferrying us around, but two hundred thousand miles. As the garage proprietor describes it. damn thing is bullet proof.
Our misguided British loyalty cost us dear. Had we bought the Mark1 Golf back in the day when our British cars were falling off their wheels, who knows how much collectors would pay for such a vintage these days? Certainly far more than any of the trash that we drove around back then.
