Well, hello to you loverly lot!!!! I was sitting here tonight reading all the posts. From Keiran and his telescopic adventures in the middle of the night when we are all blissfuly unaware of his antics...... red 'SPORTS CAR?"" When did you get that then????? I thought it was an Astra.....lol.
Drabbles??? dribbles???? Well I do a lot of that nowadays due to age.
Its good to see that life does actually have a lighter side. Keep up the good banter chaps and chapesses!!!!

its about time you came on and wrote something. we were beginning to think you did not have a computer. or could not read or something. never thought of you being senile though.

welcome!

Hello bud and welcome :)

'AHEM'

sand, when you show me an astra with 265 brake horse power, 269 pounds/feet of torque, brembo brakes, 18's, switchable ESP and all the other things like climate control etc, not to mention the 0-60 in 6.4 seconds and a top speed of over 160 miles per our pumped out by the 20 valve turbo charged engine . . .

then maybe i will consider your misconceptions of what is and is not a sports car, seriously!

also welcome to the board!

lol

god keiran listening to all that about your car, i feel sorry fo you and i bet you wish you'd got a suzuki ignis lmao

I like driving in my car, brum brum brum brum brum brum brum, it's not quite a jaguar, brum brum brum brum brum! :)

Suzuki Ignis :)

soohooky ingno? wats that! sounds small and inferior lol

My first car

I got my first car in 1977, when I was 17. It was a 1964 Ford Cotrina Mark 1 that cost £20. Anemic vomit best describes its colour (more on that later). I was just a little lass in those days, 5 feet three, less than 8 stones in weight. The seat was so low, and the steering wheel so huge, that I looked at the road through the top third of the wheel. I could see people doing a double take, thinking that the car was driving itself.

I drove it through the country roads of the Scottish borders with gay abandon. Its top speed was about 55 miles per hour with a following wind.

Every trip was an adventure. The thermostat didn’t work, so I had to stop every few miles to top up the radiator with water.

There was no radio, so I had to take my tape recorder – after all, every seventeen year old had to listen to music full blast – Abba, Peter Gabriel, Kate Bush, Diana Ross.

One very wet day I discovered a leak. Driving through a very large puddle, I found myself blinded when the water sprayed up from a hole in the floor onto my glasses. The windscreen was dry – the wipers were in the wrong place!

I can’t remember the full number plate – but it started with HGB, so I named my car Huggy Bear, after Starsky and Hutch’s friend. I was a big fan of theirs, particularly David Soul, which is why I chose to change the colour of the car.

Someone told me (probably for a joke) that Dulux gloss paint worked just fine on cars, if you used a roller. So, I got a tin of Trafalgar blue paint (lighter and brighter than royal blue) and a smaller tin of pale blue, and set to work recreating Starsky’s car. Well…Starsky’s car, but blue.

I tool it down by the river, behind my flat, and it didn’t take long to paint. Though I say it myself, it looked good too, when I left it to dry that evening. Next morning, I went to check it out.

Now, if you’re from Scotland, or you’ve ever been here, you’ll know all about midges – these tiny pests that descend on our country in the summer months and bite the living daylights out everyone. There weren’t many in the Borders that year – at least not after about a million of them got themselves stuck in the paintwork of my car! So many, the car looked as if it had a number two haircut.

So, I had to scrape it all off and start again. The second time, I picked a colder evening – midges don’t like the cold. However cold in Scotland means a heavy dew, and this time there were hundreds of little swirly circles where the moisture had landed. Probably still the only textured car in history.

One morning I looked out of the window and the car wasn’t there. Two thugs had broken into it and driven it away – about a hundred meters down the hill and slab bang into a lamppost. Huggy Bear was a write-off and never graced the roads again.

I was devastated. Even though the insurance gave me £40 for it – double its value – I knew nothing would ever replace it in my heart. Nearly thirty years on, nothing has. Here’s what I wrote at the time...

The toot of horn, the screech of brakes,
the tractor sound the engine makes,
Refreshing draughts will never mar
the joy I get out of my car!

RIP Huggy Bear!

poor huggy bear. what a car and what a story. made me think of my first car. needless to say i cannot remember what kind it was but it was a silver colour. it had no windows because someone was annoyed at my brother and smashed all the windows in it.
it had no heater, no radio, no speedometer and the door did not close. to drive it i wore glasses so the wind didnt get in my eyes. i also had to get in and use a rope across the front to tie the 2 front doors shut. this was handy as it acted a bit like a seat belt as the rope sat across me.
that first car gave me a great deal of confidence and freedom and almost certainly changed the course of my life for the better.
it was never named. when it died, i kept it for weeks as i could not accept that it had actually really died. i tried to start it every day for weeks in the hope that it had not realy gone. when eventually i agreed to it going to the scrappy. i went out so that i didn't have to be there.
they just don't make cars like that any more.

laurie, you made me laugh. These are such sad stories though - those poor cars....made me go out to my driveway and pay my little 'honey' ( yes thats her name! ) a little bit of attention. I hoovered her out, made her all shiny inside, sweet smelling, and gleaming silver with the hose!
Now im going to take her for a little drive, give her some food and drink ( petrol required ) and a nice bit of fresh air in the countryside!

xxx