Fordyce Maxwell: It dawned on me I have a farmer’s attitude to vehicles

ALL relationships can go through difficult patches: the feeling that one partner isn’t pulling their weight, a drop in performance, age starting to show, a letdown at a critical moment, a make-or-break collapse of trust.

I’ve been through all that with cars. It never quite reached the John Cleese “I’m going to give you a damn good thrashing” stage in Fawlty Towers, but with some cars it came close.

For instance, in heavy rain the distributor on a Mini van – as if I know what I’m talking about – got wet and the engine would cough and miss.

Hiccupping and jerking at high revs and low gear in an attempt to keep the engine going wasn’t conducive to looking cool, boy-racing or indeed reaching a destination for a novice driver.

The Sunbeam Rapier was a mistake. Leather upholstery, walnut dashboard, radio? Wow. Incipient rust, higher fuel consumption than a fighter jet, an engine that blew up near Barnsley? Dear, dear.

My conversion to reliability over flash began right there, although the Morris Traveller, one of the least-flash cars ever, had its moments. Notably, a reluctance to start on damp or cold mornings, when cars had chokes and engines could be flooded.

There were others after that, but for the past 20 years diesel Astras, more recently a Vectra, have given me the consistency and reliability, not to mention economy, that I like.

Yep, boring and proud. A neutral working relationship suits me: I drive or Liz drives, the car goes, and we reach destinations trouble-free.

Occasionally I wash it, even more occasionally polish. Jerome K Jerome, writing about bicycles more than a century ago, pointed out that it was possible to either ride a bicycle or polish and tinker with it, but not to do both. That is also true of motorbikes, boats and cars, and I prefer to drive.

It has also dawned on me recently that I still have a farmer’s attitude to a vehicle. That is, I’ve always used cars to transport anything that would fit in, from animals to a Rubik’s Cube-like masterly insertion of chairs, to trips to the rubbish depot.

As a result, over the years cars have had scratches, scrapes and occasional small dents. Studying the present one yesterday, after unloading wood and gravel, I realised it had suffered more than most.

But my last Astra covered more than 160,000 miles with never a cross word, and I’d like the Vectra to do the same by about 2020. Trade-in value by then won’t be affected by a few battle scars – pretty much what Liz says about me. «