“Nah. It can’t really be nineteen. That’s like one a year, and you had a few for years?”

 

I’d been talking to a mate about the relative merits of manual and automatic gearboxes (the latter, obviously, being horrid and silly things but sometimes unavoidably attached to otherwise exceptional vehicles), and found myself reminiscing about my life long relationship with cars. Counting the ones that I had owned, the tally did indeed reach that number. It may in reality go higher; my history behind the wheel may be littered with memories I’ve thus far managed to repress. So here goes nothing.

 

I’ve been driving since I was 17 and about ten minutes old. I used to explain this by reference to my being from the Highlands, where public transport operated on a largely theoretical basis and where driving was in any case something to do in a place of not-much-to-do, but in over twenty years in Edinburgh my love affair with the wheel(s) has simply intensified. I was on my third car by the time I left school - a gruesome Ford Cortina which once petulantly threw one of its windscreen wipers into a field during a downpour, refused to bump start into second gear even travelling downhill at 30mph, set itself on fire in protest at an attempt to fit a radio into its vile, clammy dashboard, and would only start when the air filter inlet was jammed open by my mother with a blunt knife as I turned the ignition key with increasing desperation (and the air blue with increasingly desperate and decidedly parent-unfriendly language). The list of reasons for my lateness submitted over that last year to the headmaster’s office read like the very darkest parts of an AA patrol’s therapy session. Before that, life on the road (singular, it was the Highlands) was in an inexplicably yellow Mk 3 Ford Escort, but it all started (unlike the Cortina) with a Mini. Not the cutesy BMW rebrand, of course, but an original 950cc dark-blue four seater cuboid, with no headrests and those weird triangular windows that could just be opened to about ten degrees (and even then only for as long as no passing breath of wind slammed them shut again).

 

However the Mini is memorable chiefly for being sold by me for £200, a full fifty quid less than the amount I had paid some months (weeks?) previously, and thus setting me, unwaveringly, on a path of quite staggering fiscal incompetence into the vehicular arena. You  know that friend that’s good with cars? The one you’d take to an auction with you? Or call when your garage has quoted you a gazillion pounds to replace something barely visible to the naked eye which you know has an actual cost of whatever change you have in your pocket? That guy. Picture him, or her, for a second. Ok, now imagine their absolute, diametrically-opposed and literal opposite.

 

Hello!

 

If I ever sold a car for as much as half of what I’d first paid, I was as delighted as I was surprised. I’ve picked cars which lasted for a single day, smoke billowing almost instantly from the engine as if from the Vatican chimney to announce to the world: he’s done it again. I’ve bought a car to make a specific journey; that ended as well as you might imagine, back on the phone to the AA from a friendly farmer’s house (pre-mobile days, these), and when asked for the vehicle registration, an admission that I hadn’t yet learned it in the hours of my ownership. I’ve driven to Romania and back in a characterful but fairly ancient, somewhat tatty and cheap Jaguar XJS, which would somewhat disconcertingly switch itself off at rush hour in a variety of European capitals, until I got back to the UK to discover all that was needed was the automotive equivalent of control-alt-delete at the dealer. (Fortunately it never pulled that trick on the Autobahn on the way into Berlin; it may have been keen to switch off from time to time, but when it was on, it was very much on.)

 

However, as I got older, it transpired that I had inadvertently made at least one roadworthy financial decision: always to insure, from 17, the cars myself. At that time it was possible to do so for a couple of hundred quid, rather less than the £1300 I’ve just seen that it would cost a 17 year old to insure a ten year old Ford Ka (indeed some quotes ran well over three grand). This meant that when it became time to indulge my love of older, bigger, faster vehicles (what James May might describe as “a lot of car for your money”), my no claims bonus made it just about possible to get affordable insurance. This even applied when telling the insurance companies of my occupations: “broadcaster” and “band manager” aren’t phrases which usually put smiles on their faces (or perhaps they do, given the loaded premiums they then feel able to charge).

 

So after driving what now seems like an entire season of Top Gear cheap car challenges into the ground over the years (including a manky old BMW 518 with only two of its four cylinders operating, a Datsun Cherry so badly resprayed that inside the seats were dusted with red paint, and a Rover 213 which handled like a kitchen stool and which ominously and accurately had the first “R” on its rear badge missing), I finally met the love of my automotive life. A Jaguar XJR. Old, but with low mileage, a four-litre twin-supercharged V8 Le Mans racing engine, comfort the like of which cannot sensibly be conveyed by the English language alone, and bought for about the same as a new Vauxhall Vectra. I can say without fear of contradiction that it put a smile on my face on each and every day of the seven years during which I owned that car.

 

Every day, that is, except one - the day on which a leaking cylinder head gasket was diagnosed as the reason for the water loss and overheating problems which I’d done my best to ignore. I didn’t really know what a cylinder head gasket was, only that the complexity of repairing it on an engine such as the XJR’s would require the hiring of cranes, applications for street closures, the remortgage of this and any house in which I ever would live. You get the idea. By the end, my beautiful old Jag was worth a fraction so small of its purchase price, a scanning electron microscope would be required just to measure it.

 

I have loved again, of course (the Jag was, I think, sixteen of nineteen), but if you don’t think I metaphorically keep a picture of it in a heart-shaped frame next to my bed then you’re absolutely out of your mind. These days I drive a Renault Grand Espace: it’s solid, bonkers in the way that Renaults were for a while (swooping digital dash, no rev counter, stereo system bolted inaccessibly under the driver’s seat for reasons which I am certain are unclear even to the designer), but perfect for my work managing the band Six Storeys High. In June it went round the whole of the UK: two thousand miles on tour with five of us, five guitars, three amps, a full drum kit and bags full of clothes, bottles and, well, everything else you’d probably imagine a band taking on tour. It’s hard not to bond with a car when you’re effectively using it as your touring bubble for a fortnight. But inevitably it will, sometime, be necessary to find something else that will do all of the above - and that will be a special vehicle indeed. For it will be my twentieth. A milestone, truly, and hopefully not one next to which it will break down.