In the entry Stow-on-the-Wold I described how my first car, a Reliant Regal MkIV, needed to have the spark plugs cleaned every 20 miles.This "sparked" (sorry!) an email from mate Alex:
"20 miles my arse - I remember going to the Regal (cinema not the Reliant) one time after you had spent half of Saturday afternoon cleaning your spark plugs, then you had to change the buggers again before we set off home!"It's so sad when old friends lose their memories and succumb to old age, but the journey Alex is remembering was in my second car - a Reliant Regal MkV or MkVI which was a saloon car not a van and indeed messed up its spark plugs in a mere 7-10 miles. I had to ditch the van after the Department of Transport decided to ask me to have it weighed and it turned out to weigh more than the maximum allowed for a 16-year-old to drive.
This was due to a metal sheet that had been placed in the back of the van to cover holes in the wooden flooring! The blue Ford Anglia seat that had replaced Reliant's original deckchair style passenger seat couldn't have helped either...
I was lucky with cars - the saloon car gave up the ghost spectacularly when the engine mountings snapped one day, plunging the engine down and forward into the radiator, causing clouds of steam from the front of the car and great hilarity from the small crowd waiting at a bus stop just opposite...
I'm so sorry. I don't think I'd be able to read this if I didn't know that your happy ending was still out there waiting.
ReplyDeleteYou'd think so wouldn't you? But then there were two defunct 3-wheelers on the drive and one Saturday when both my Dad and I were out my Mum sold them both as a job lot for a fiver... Two cars for a fiver... What really upset my Dad was that she went and got a brand new battery which we'd had to get for one of them out of the shed to give with the cars too.
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