Driven

At first I’d gone at it with a pair of pliers and a screwdriver. I managed to crack the plastic glass of the back windscreen with the screwdriver and then bent the roof back with the pliers, but to get the roof off was going to require something a little more lethal. So I got out the Stanley knife and started sawing away at the uprights on the back. I was sawing away, sawing away, sawing away and I sawed straight through the metal and into my thumb. When I went running into the house shouting ‘Deep, deep, deep, deep, deep, deep!’ and holding up my spouting hand to show my mum, my thumb was literally hanging off. It took seven stitches to put it back on. I can’t remember what I told my mum I’d been doing. I don’t think she cared: she was too busy worrying about the fact that my thumb was hanging off and my blood was going everywhere. My dad knew what I’d been doing though. He didn’t say anything, but he knew. My dad’s of the opinion that most parents can be too protective of kids. Instead of trying to stop me from doing dangerous things, my dad would say, ‘He’s going to hurt himself in a minute, watch this.’ When I did, he’d turn round and say, ‘Told you.’ He always claimed it was the best way to learn, and, painful though the lessons were, he was usually right.

Remote control cars were the ultimate toy. I used to have remote control buggies and me and my mates would build race tracks and jumps for them and we’d drive them all over the farm. They were proper little all-terrain things and they could really go. They were toys, but they were quick little things. I never had Scalextric though. That was always too expensive. But it was okay because I used to save up and buy these remote control cars, a cross between a beach buggy and a stock car. They came in a kit that you’d build, and which I then used to modify – no surprise there. Like a junior remote control Pimp My Ride I’d sticker them up and paint the wheels and the rims, always trying to make them better. My mates never really used to bother tricking theirs out, so they were never quite as good as mine. Well, I didn’t think so. My modifications didn’t usually make them go any quicker, but they looked cooler.

The important thing, though – and this has really stuck with me – is that I always used to look after them well. Whereas most kids would use them and trash them, I would use them then maintain them and keep them in mint condition. Even now I can’t stand it if something happens to one of my cars. If I kerb a wheel, that’s it, it has to go straight off to have the wheels sorted out. These dings you get when some idiot in a Volvo opens his door on to yours; the little chips you get when gravel kicks up and nicks the paintwork – I can’t stand to look at them. The second I spot something like that, that’s it, it’s got to be a respray straight away. I don’t care how much it costs, I can’t look at it. It’s the one thing that really, really bugs me, and I was the same way about my cars even when they came with batteries and a little crystal radio control unit.

The other thing that’s stuck with me since the days when I used to zoom my little tricked-out buggy around the hard standing out the back of our house is the ambition one day to have a proper track to race them on. When I was a kid, I used to dream of having a garden of my own. I decided that when I had my own house I was going to build a race track for my remote control cars, a proper track with little humps and jumps and everything. It was going to be ace. It never happened of course. You get older, you grow up, you pack away your childhood toys and your dreams change. Now I want a proper full-size track in my back garden. A proper tarmacked go-kart track to go all the way round the house and my back garden, for me and my mates to drive proper full-size go-karts around. I don’t think the neighbours would be too happy, but it would be bloody cool.

4 THE CASTLE HOWARD RUBBISH RUN: THE FERRARI 308 (#ulink_fe608295-18e2-5d97-b950-b5bcadca58fa)

My dad only ever had one great guiding philosophy in life: if you can walk, you can work. So if you wanted pocket money in our house, you bloody well worked for it. After a few years of odd-job earners, from mowing the lawn and other gardening tasks to helping out with the animals when my dad decided to ‘have a go at farming’, I officially went on the payroll at seven years old.

My first regular job was parking cars at Castle Howard. Not literally, of course – my feet wouldn’t have reached the pedals and I’d never have got insurance. No, my job was directing cars into the car park when there were big events on at the house. There were a lot of weddings and corporate dinners there, when the likes of BP and Shell would pay loads to hire the place for a night and have big fireworks displays and military bands and that kind of thing. It was my dad’s job to organise it all, including the parking. Castle Howard was the only place to work for miles around, especially if you were seven, so my dad put a word in and got me and my best mate David Coates the gig.

It was a big responsibility. On average there’d be something like three hundred people coming to an event, down the long driveway in coaches and cars, and you had to make absolutely certain that they parked in the right place or Simon Howard and the rest of the family who still own and run the house would get really upset. You had to make sure that all the visitors and guests parked on the right-hand side of the drive, not the left, because the left side was the Howard family’s garden and they weren’t too keen on people parking on it. Funny that. So I’d be there, with Herbert Press the gardener, who used to do all the edgings on the lawns and the flower beds and had done for something like 80 years. Herbert would go out in his flat cap, stop the traffic and direct the cars to the bottom of the drive where I’d get them to swing out to the left, and then I’d guide them as they backed up towards the fence on the right.

Because of the nature of the events, we used to get all kinds of amazing cars there. I’d be there helping Bentleys, Ferraris and Aston Martins to back up into spaces: to me, to me, bit more, bit more, stop. That’s a lot of pressure for a seven-year-old. Obviously, once they were all parked and everyone was inside eating their lavish meals, we’d be out there, me and David, wandering around, looking at all these fantastic motors. We’d be there for hours, checking out all the angles, peering in through the windows, admiring bodywork; we’d be wowing over the big chrome bumpers on the Bentleys, the beautiful leather of the Astons and the exciting lines of the Ferraris. There’d be an event – a dinner, a concert or a wedding – every couple of weeks at least, sometimes more, and always there’d be these unbelievable motors.

It was like stepping into another world for me. My dad might have been the Don when it came to running Castle Howard, but he never earned big bucks. There was no Aston Martin or Mercedes or Bentley parked outside our house.

In fact the Howards themselves were never that big into cars, certainly not cool ones. They always preferred the reliable and the practical over the glamorous and the exciting, with the possible exception of Nick Howard, one of the sons, who, I would later discover, had better taste than anyone knew. (At least I think it was Nick, I never found out for certain.)

So parking those cars was a great job. David and I would have to be there for the whole evening because we had to see them out of the car park again at the end of the night, so we’d be there a good six hours, and we got paid quite well for it, something like a fiver a night, which for a seven-year-old was good money back then. You could buy quite a lot of Floral gums with that. Save it up long enough, which I of course did, and you’d have a new skateboard, or at least some new wheels and ball bearings to trick it out with. Either that or I’d buy something to do with motoring: a toy car, a model car, a remote control car, always something good. Not like most of my mates who, as soon as they got any spare cash, would do what my sister did and be straight off down the pound shop, blowing it on loads of rubbish they didn’t really want. I always knew exactly what I wanted and I’d save every penny until I had enough to get it. That was my dad’s logic. Even if he’d had the money he probably still wouldn’t have given it to you because he wouldn’t have thought you would appreciate it. Harsh but probably true, and definitely a good thing. Certainly none of the money I earned, from mowing my granddad’s lawn to parking the cars at Castle Howard, was ever wasted.

By the age of nine David and I had been promoted to the pot wash. Well, it wasn’t promotion so much as moving inside. It was still bloody cold though. The pot wash area was just outside the main kitchen. We didn’t wash the pots from the kitchen itself, that was done by Izzy, a lovely old woman who was always bent over the sink. We used to wash all the cutlery and plates and glasses. As with the car park, we did this work when they were having big dinners and events at the house, but there was a cafeteria as well, which meant that we’d be working weekends too, making it a much more regular income than the car park gig. Saturday and Sunday I used to go up there and work, and after school as well, washing the cups and saucers in one of those industrial dishwashers, the ones where you pile everything up in a big wire basket, slide it into the machine, pull down the hood and a couple of minutes later all your plates come out clean and sparkling. It wasn’t as exciting as seeing all those great cars but the money was good and there were plenty of opportunities for overtime.

At the end of the night David and I would have to take the rubbish out. Now, having just catered for three hundred-odd people, the kitchens used to generate a hell of a lot of rubbish, and the bins were a hell of a long way away. It wasn’t quite as simple as opening the kitchen door and sticking the black bin bags outside. Come the end of the evening there’d be a mountain of them piled up and they would need taking to the big industrial bins out by the garages right on the other side of the building. In the kitchen there were these tall trolleys designed to have metal trays slotted in them which were usually stacked with plates. Once we’d bagged all the rubbish, David and I would take those metal trays out, pile the trolleys high with black sacks and wheel them off. You could get about 16 black sacks on each trolley, and even then sometimes you’d need to do more than one journey.

Those trolleys used to make a hell of a racket, like a load of pots and pans being chucked down a staircase. You could hear us coming a mile off, which, given what lay ahead, was not a good thing. You’d take a run up the disabled ramp then go along this 150-foot-long corridor, past the toilets and through the door at the end, for which you needed a key. Once through that door you were into the back areas of Castle Howard. Imagine, it’s a really old castle, all little archways and tiny dim lights. We’re talking proper creepy. Not a place you really want to be late at night with nobody else around, or even with your best mate if he’s just as freaked out as you are and who is making you even more jumpy.

What made it worse was that you knew somewhere out there, down that corridor, waiting for you in the dark, behind a door that may or may not be locked (in our overactive imaginations it was always unlocked and open) was Tasha the dog. Tasha was this absolutely massive possessed dog that used to bark and snarl like it hadn’t been fed in a decade. It was like a huge St Bernard Wolfhound cross and it used to frighten the shit out of everybody. If you listened really hard you could almost hear him sniffing you out as you stood there at the beginning of the corridor.

Needless to say, taking the rubbish to the bins was not something we looked forward to. You knew that if, God forbid, Tasha did actually get out he’d come screaming round the corner and rip you apart in ten seconds flat, no question. So we always had a plan of what we’d do, how we’d jink the trolleys and kink them this way so we’d be able to use them as a barricade before making a run for it. Ideally, though, you just wanted to get to the other end of the corridor as quickly and quietly as possible, and hopefully Tasha wouldn’t hear you, or if he did you’d already be past his door (whichever one it was) and it would be too late for him to break it down, run out and claw you to shreds.

The corridor ran right under the Howards’ private residence, so rubber matting had been put down to dampen the noise of the trolleys going backwards and forwards late at night. This was good. It at least gave us a fighting chance of making it past Tasha unheard. To up the odds even more in our favour, to make sure that the trolley didn’t bounce and make a load of noise, and to ensure we got out of there as quickly as possible, as soon as we hit a straight stretch we used to jump on the trolleys and zoom down the corridor, jumping back off just before we hit the door at the end that led out into the courtyard area where the bins and garages were.

Normally that was the end of it. You’d unload all the bin bags, chuck them in the industrial bins, turn round and go back, praying to God that Tasha hadn’t come to in the meantime. One night, though, something caught my eye. I’ve no idea how I saw it, it was just there in the corner of my eye, a flash of red paint through a crack in one of the garage doors. In that courtyard, just next to where the bins were, there were three big grey wooden garage doors. Usually what was behind them wasn’t of much interest so I never bothered looking. The Howard family liked Land Rovers and Saabs and Volvos, which have to be the worst cars on the road not least because their drivers feel so safe in them they have absolutely no fear of taking everybody else out. But this one night the garage doors were open the tiniest bit, just a crack, and I could see this little bit of red paint.

I knew instantly what it was. I turned to David and shouted in a whisper, ‘There’s a fucking Ferrari in there!’

I told him to wait there, I was just going to have a look. I don’t think David was upset about having to wait behind and stand guard, he was just shitting himself, giving me a look of terror that said, ‘Don’t do it, don’t do it!’

I crept over to the door and pressed my eye to the gap – no harm in that. It was eleven pm and I was sneaking around the Howards’ private garage when I should have been doing the bins – hardly a hanging offence. I was only there about five minutes, just looking through that crack, not doing any harm, but always looking back at David to make sure nobody was coming. He looked at me suddenly with an expression that said he knew exactly what I was thinking, and he started shaking his head. But it was too late. I’d pushed the door open.

I found myself inside the Howards’ private garage looking at this stunning Ferrari. It was a 308GTB, with a hard top, but the fibreglass model. I knew this because I’d just given the bodywork a good tap. I may have been just nine years old but I knew my Ferrari 308GTBs from my 308GTSs (the soft-top) and I knew my fibreglass bodies from the later steel ones. I tapped on the body and looked at the deep spoiler at the front. Then I went round the side and ran my hand along the door panel and over the little black door latch. I gave it a little pull just to see what it did. And of course the door opened. I figured if I got caught at this point I was in deep shit anyway, and with the door open I was practically in the car already, so I thought, ‘Sod it,’ and I got in.

I just remember thinking, ‘Bloody hell, I’m in a Ferrari. I’m in a Ferrari!’ This was in the days of Magnum, when Tom Selleck used to drive a red 308GTS, so literally there was no cooler car on the planet. Remember, around that sort of time I was looking at my school mates’ dads driving their Opal Mantas and thinking, ‘Why can’t my dad drive an Opal Manta?’ That was about the size of it in my little village in North Yorkshire; but here I was sat in a Ferrari. Of course when you’re a kid you have no idea about the worth of adult things like bricks and mortar, so to my nine-year-old car-obsessed mind this Ferrari was worth more than Castle Howard itself. It had to be at least a couple of hundred million quid surely, maybe even a trillion.

What I knew for a fact, though, was that I’d never sat in anything like it before. It had all these little toggle switches, a big chrome plate on the gated gearbox, black leather seats with these little studs on them (which they now call Daytona seating), a grey/black dashboard top, a black leather steering wheel with three metal spokes and the little prancing horse in the middle…I just remember staring at that little horse, mesmerised by it. I was only in the car for four or five minutes, but it’s like a photographic memory. I took in every single detail, drank it all in, absorbed it, convinced that I was never going to see another one as long as I lived, let alone sit in one (and if I hadn’t I’d probably still have died happy knowing that I’d had the chance to experience one and taken it). This was my moment to see and remember everything about it.

And that’s when I noticed it. The smell. That Ferrari smell. I’d never smelled anything like it ever, and the only time I’ve smelled it since is in other Ferraris. It’s a special, Italian sports car, leather, luxury, money, petrol, passion kind of a smell, and it’s unforgettable.

Nor will I forget the panic when I suddenly realised that of all the things I’d seen, not one of them was an interior door handle. I spent the next two minutes frantically searching for a way to get out (the door release on the 308 is extremely well hidden). Eventually I got the door open, and after rubbing my fingerprints off the paintwork I legged it back to David who was now looking more terrified than he’d ever looked at the thought of Tasha tearing him limb from limb.

That was the first time I sat in a Ferrari. As long as I live I’ll be sure of one thing: I’ll never forget that car. Every detail is still imprinted on my memory. As for who it belonged to, I never found out for sure. Of the two Howard brothers I always imagined it was Nick who was the proud owner of the 308GTB. Whoever it was, and whoever left that garage door open with the light on and the car unlocked, they made a young boy very, very happy – and later cost a grown-up chef a hell of a lot of money.

5 LES VOITURES (MERDE) DE MON PERE (#ulink_ba06551d-fdc4-5111-b121-640cca1f5b1b)

I inherited many things from my father. My height, for one: I’m 6 ft 3 in and so was he when he was a strapping young lad. My work ethic: my father believed anything was possible if you were willing to work hard enough for it, a sentiment I wholeheartedly endorse. My temper: for both of us the line between calmness and absolute mayhem is a very fine one you don’t really want to make us cross. And my love of food and wine: as well as being a catering manager my dad was an internationally respected sommelier, one of only two non-French judges on the Jurade de Saint Emilion, which classifies Bordeaux wines. Thankfully, though, of all the things I inherited from my father, his taste in cars wasn’t one of them. If anything, the exact opposite is true. If he had a particular car, you can be pretty damn sure I never will. He has what can only be described as an unhealthy obsession with French cars. I, again thankfully, don’t. The only thing he likes more than a French car is a cheap one. If it’s French and cheap, well, nothing makes him happier.

My earliest motoring memories are of my dad’s ‘bargains’. Needless to say, they aren’t happy memories. There was the MkI Escort, the Datsun Sunny, and the white Ford Capri 1.6 Laser with the brown cloth interior, the kind chocolate crumbs used to be drawn to and were then impossible to get off: when you tried scratching chocolate off the seats with your fingernail it just got even more attached and went white. Being a proper Yorkshireman, my dad could never resist a bargain. It didn’t matter how rubbish the car he ended up with was, just as long as he got a good deal on it. I remember, years and years later, him ringing me up full of excitement and telling me that he’d just bought himself a Rolls-Royce. I thought, ‘Bloody hell, this is it. He’s done it. He’s finally come to his senses. He’s worked hard all his life, he’s saved up his money and he’s bought himself a proper Rolls-Royce.’ I was genuinely excited for him and couldn’t wait to see it. When I got to his house, there it was, sitting outside, his Rolls-Royce. And it was white. He’d gone and bought a white Rolls-Royce, like the ones they use for weddings – which was quite fitting really because he’s on his third marriage. His liking for wedding cake and giving all his money away in divorce settlements are two more of his traits I managed to avoid, although my sister wasn’t so lucky.

It’s like he can’t say no, to bargains or weddings. Yes, it’s a hideous car and a horrible colour, and he probably knows it’s a hideous car and he probably can’t stand the colour either, but it’s cheap, so he’ll have it. If he had eight grand to spend on a car and there was a nice one he really liked for eight grand and one that was French and not very nice at all for six grand, he would buy the not-very-nice six grand one, even though he could afford the one he really wanted. If it was a bargain he just wouldn’t be able to turn it down. I got my first car when I was twelve, a little Fiat 126, because someone offered it to him for £40. I’m not complaining. I loved that car, drove it all over the farm and had a great time in it. But I was twelve. I didn’t need a car. All right, I’d had bikes and trikes and I’d driven tractors, and I know he thought it would be a good experience for me to learn to drive in the relative safety of the farm, but the reason he got it was because it had failed its MOT and someone at work was selling it cheap. It was a bargain too good to turn down. Same with the Beetle he bought my mum, and the six Minis he bought my sister. She wrote off five of them but he kept them coming because they were all cheap.

He was always getting a deal from some wheeler-dealer somewhere. Even his cars, which were partly for work and for which he had a budget, he had to try to get a deal on. He would never do what most of my mates do now, which is look at the 40 grand budget their work’s given them for a car and think, ‘If I add 20 grand of my own I can get something really good.’ He would say, ‘I’ve got 40 grand. If I can find a car for 20 grand I’ll have saved 20 grand.’ Which of course is what he did, and which was why all my mates’ dads had amazingly cool cars and I was being dropped off at the school gates in a white Ford Capri 1.6 Laser with brown cloth interior.

It wasn’t just cars my father’s nose for a bargain got in the way of. It also had a laughable effect on his ‘farming’ skills. As you already know, we weren’t farmers, not really. My dad was a catering manager and my mum worked in a shoe shop – what did we know about farming? In his day job, my father was a very successful man; later, as promotions manager, he was responsible for bringing the filming of the the Granada TV version of Brideshead Revisited to Castle Howard and for putting on huge outdoor concerts featuring Bryan Ferry, José Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti. When he first started the place was attracting something like 30 or 40 visitors a day; when he left it was more like 4,000. Part of the deal was that the better you did at Castle Howard, the bigger the place you got, so we had a load of land with our house and it seemed a shame to waste it. As the place was called Lime Kiln Farm – the huge lime kiln was still there and perfect/lethal for a boy with a bike and no sense of danger – it was obvious to my dad that agriculture should be our sideline.

I think I was about five or six when my dad decided that it might be a good idea to try his hand at farming, and it was probably about eleven or twelve years later that my mother finally reached the end of her patience and decided that it wasn’t. In between, I, along with the rest of my family, was subjected to a long list of ridiculous schemes. When we started breeding pigs, my dad spotted a ‘bargain’ boar in Exchange & Mart which was a deal too good to pass up, just like his cars. Now, anyone who knows anything about pig farming will tell you that in order to have good piglets you need good sows and, most importantly, a good boar. They’ll also tell you that though boars can be very expensive, if you get a good one, it’ll be an investment. My father had found a boar for sale for £50 – suspiciously cheap for most, but he thought it was his lucky day. He hitched the trailer up to the car, drove the 60 miles to Northampton, paid the old dear who was selling it, came back, put it in the pen next to the females – who were ready, able and by this time well up for it – opened the gate and waited. And waited. And waited. You’ve never seen a male so disinterested in the female of the species in your whole life. So my dad called the vet, who came over, took one look and asked, ‘Where did you buy it from? It’s not the one from Northampton is it?’ Turned out this boar was famous as the only gay boar in the village. My dad went nuts. We were eating bacon for months after that.

My dad was just a useless farmer, there was no two ways about it. At one point we had 50 chickens, 25 cockerels and 25 hens, and the hens weren’t laying. My dad, in his infinite wisdom, decided that the cockerels must be the problem, interfering with the hens and stopping them laying. So he went out one afternoon and just killed the cockerels. All of them. A week later, still nothing, no eggs, so he got the vet out again and it turned out that he’d got rid of the hens. We had 25 cockerels running around and my dad was waiting for them to lay.

In the end it was once again his complete inability to turn away a good deal that proved to be the last straw (pun intended). One day, for no reason other than it was really, really cheap, he decided to buy all the hay from the field next door. At the time we had pigs and cattle so we needed hay for feed and bedding. But we only had 16 pigs and a dozen cows and the field next door was bloody massive. A Texan ranch wouldn’t have been able to use all the hay that came from it. When he had it delivered it made a 50 foot by 50 foot stack. As you drove up to the hill, you couldn’t see the house any more, just this giant haystack. My mother was furious. It didn’t help matters when she discovered that my dad had left all the windows open at the back of the house so there was hay and dust everywhere inside. That was it. My mother decided enough was enough, we were getting out of farming for good.

Meanwhile his fixation with cheap cars continued, and if it wasn’t a bargain it had to be French. Peugeots, Citroëns, hideous, hideous things I had to go to school in which left me mentally scarred for life. After years of this cruel and unusual punishment I vowed never to buy a French car, and I never will. He had a Peugeot 306, a 406, a 505, Citroën Xantias, an XM and a BX, the one with the hydraulic suspension that made the back go up and down although no one ever really knew why. They were dreadful cars that looked like they’d been specifically designed to be rubbish. I can only think that his obsession with French cars was because he loved French food and wine. I listened to him on the subject of the food and the wine, but not the cars. They were crap. And I mean really crap.

My dad’s apparent phobia of anything even approaching a proper driver’s car is all the more ironic when you know that he’s actually an ex-traffic copper. Not only that, he used to be an advanced police driving instructor. Yes, he actually taught policemen how to drive. When we were kids, if me and my sister were playing up in the back of the car and my mother wasn’t around, he’d suddenly pull some of his old moves and scare the shit out of us. That would shut us up. Back when he was chasing robbers all over the south of England he used to drive a big MkII Jag, like the one Inspector Morse had, only with a blue light and a siren. Literally, you couldn’t get anything further removed from a Citroën Xantia if you tried. I can only think that he felt he got all the driving he wanted to do out of his system when he was in the police force and didn’t see the point of having something more driveable afterwards. Maybe it was enough for him to know he could do it; he didn’t need a flash motor to prove it. Still, a MkII Jag to a BX?

Maybe it has something to do with how he left the police force. He’s a real no-nonsense type of a character, my dad, not one for big shows of emotion or niceties. He’s all about getting the job done and that’s that, and he’s got loads of great stories about giving yobs and nutters a bit of old-fashioned treatment, the kind where the rule book went out the window and the baddies got what was coming to them.

The best was always the one about the armed robbery in Pepworth in Brighton. The robbers escaped in a Transit van and were thought to be heading to London. Everyone knew that if they made it to the capital they’d get away, so the best chance the police had was to stop them en route. My dad was sat in his MkII Jag in a lay-by on the A3, listening to the reports coming in on his radio – details of the robbery, a description of the robbers and their van, which of them was armed, their current location – and he realised they were heading his way. After a while he saw them coming up the hill, and knowing that they had to be stopped before they got much closer to London he decided the only thing to do was throttle down and T-bone them. Which he did. He T-boned them so hard that he knocked their van off the road and into a ditch, and his MkII ended up on top (he said this was probably just as well because it meant they couldn’t open the doors, and if they’d got out they would probably have shot him). It was a good result. When the chasing police cars arrived they nicked the robbers and everyone was happy. But in taking them off the road my dad had rolled his Jag and done his back in, and he had to leave the force as a result. He then did what all ex-coppers do: he ran a pub. Two very successful pubs in fact. Then he moved to York where he ran a Terry’s restaurant (as in the people who make the chocolate oranges), which is where he met my mother, who was going out with Stan the head chef at the time. She dumped him for my dad, the restaurant manager. (Head Chef Dumped for Restaurant Manager – story of my life, that is.) From there he went to Castle Howard, and his interest in cars and driving has rarely been seen since. Which was a shame, because when you’re a kid, getting a new car is the most exciting thing in the world. I can remember as clear as if it were yesterday the day my best mate David Coates’s parents got their MkII Escort. Now that was a cool car. It was only 2 litre, but that didn’t matter, it was just a really cool car. Even the 1.6, the RS, was cool. Some cars are just cool, and the one David Coates’s parents had just bought definitely qualified. I can also clearly remember the day my dad got his new Citroën XM, and we arrived at school just as another good mate of mine was pulling up in his dad’s brand-new bright red Opal Manta (which, as I said, is quite obviously shit now but back then was the bollocks).

Ten years old, my dad’s got a brand-new car, I arrive at school, and the whole car park, David’s MkII Escort and the Manta included, just Top Trumps me.

Even when my dad did come close to getting it right he still managed to find the world’s most uncool cars. I don’t know what happened. I think he must have been hit on the head one day, but he suddenly went from buying nothing but French cars to nothing but Audis. Ordinarily this would have been a very good move, but once again my dad’s love of a bargain did its worst. First we had an Audi 80, in gold, which he got because it was cheap. Of course it was cheap. Who the hell wants to drive a gold car? After that we moved up in the world with an Audi 100. A metallic lime green one. With a lime green interior. Jesus Christ you were buzzing when you got to school if you got a lift in that. No wonder I always preferred to ride my bike the 5 miles to school rather than face the embarrassment (and the headache).

The only time I can ever remember being genuinely excited at the thought of my dad buying a new car was one afternoon in York at the end of a long day touring the showrooms as part of our ritual two-yearly car hunt. For some reason it was just me and my dad going round the usual suspects, looking at the least exciting cars you could ever imagine – well, he was; I was looking at the latest hot hatches. After going to all the Peugeot and Citroën garages he knew, we made an unexpected stop at a very different type of showroom. I knew the garage in question well because I used to pass by it when I walked my gran’s Yorkshire terrier Tuppence. It always had a very fine selection of the latest sports cars on display. Not the kind of place you’d expect to find my father.

We went in, and sandwiched between a white and green Lotus Cortina and a white Ford Escort RS Turbo was a red Lotus Eclat with cream interior. Definitely not my father’s kind of car. My dad was, as always, in a suit, so the salesman was all over him like a rash, and before I knew what was happening he was handing the keys to my dad who looked at me, winked, and asked me if I fancied a spin. My dad wanted to go for a spin, in a Lotus Eclat. I couldn’t believe it. I really, really couldn’t believe it. I wasn’t just surprised, I was in shock.

Off we went down the road in the red Lotus Eclat with the cream leather and suddenly my dad came alive. Speeding down the dual carriageway it was like he was back in his MkII Jag, chasing bad guys and showing what a former advanced police driving instructor could do. It was like the car had instantly taken 20 years off him.

He didn’t buy it of course. It wasn’t French, it certainly wasn’t a bargain, and no doubt my mother would have had more than a few things to say about it. I was a little disappointed when he handed the keys back, but at the same time I was so shocked by the fact that we’d gone out in it in the first place I don’t think I ever got as far as thinking about what might happen at the end of the test drive. It’s a shame really. For a minute there he looked like he was really enjoying himself, like he’d remembered there was more to cars than deals and boot space. I wish he’d rediscover it again, blow off the cobwebs and the stink of garlic and get behind the wheel of a proper car. It’ll never happen though. Last I heard he’d just bought a Citroën Xantia. The cheap one.

6 BMXs, BUNNY-HOPS AND BROWNIES (#ulink_24e8b4f2-6978-5929-ae39-fc9870e83334)

It’s 1983, I’m ten, I’ve got a regular job washing pots in the kitchens of Castle Howard, and I’ve just got a Raleigh Aero-Pro Burner. Life doesn’t get much better.

You see, the Raleigh Aero-Pro Burner wasn’t just a BMX, it was the coolest BMX there was. Chrome frame, black five-spoke mag wheels, black pads, it was a proper BMXer’s bike – or it was when I was finished with it – and I was a proper BMXer. For me, BMXing was the realisation of my skateboarding dream. I could never really do skateboarding. I had all the gear, I’d tricked my board out and I was ready to pull some moves – ride railings, flip my board, fly off half pipes – but I just couldn’t stand up on the thing. BMXing was much more my thing. I was a natural.