Bad to the Bone

I mentioned before that I'd sold the Honda 400/4 and the CM125 and used the money to buy the single most disastrous vehicle I ever bought.
I'm gonna keep this one brief, as I didn't get to drive it, much.
With the thousand quid I bought my partner a red Triumph Spitfire.
It came from a young poshish bloke in Port Talbot, and while it looked a little battered the soft top was sound, everything worked, or seemed to at least, and it had a years MOT (For all five of my foreign readers, thats a certificate of roadworthiness. Brit cars need one ever year.).
We both loved it, it was rorty, and classy, and tarty, made a racket, and theres nothing like getting the top down on an empty valleys road, with the sun streaming through the trees, and giving that accelerator pedal a good hard boot, feeling the back end fishtail a bit, ragging it into a couple of bends and flooring it again out of them.

ok, so imagine this a year older, rustier, tattier and sagging in the middle

Not a lot of the panels fitted, and everything creaked a bit. Things broke, but on a 20 year old Spitfire, what do you expect? We bought our own wheel clamp to stop the scrotes from having it away. Parts were easy to come by, and it had a nice 1500 engine, with two gulping carbs sucking in house bricks, pheasants and small children through minimal air filtering. Only did about 25 to the gallon, but fuck it, eh?

I didn't get to drive it much, but when I did, it stirred the blood.
But when winter came, a decidedly loose Spitfire with tolerances in cubits, an ill-fitting soft top and a minimalist heater was not what you needed on roads that where several inches deep in snow a good part of the time.
And then we'd had it a year, and took it for an MOT, and found that thing was a bit lethal. Chassis, body, steering components etc, were pretty much shot away.  There was no way on earth it had got through an MOT a year before - the level of rot implied it hadn't been roadworthy for years, and we could only assume Junior had bought the certificate down the pub.

So it was sold, for a few hundred pounds, to a young lady I had just met on the university course I was enrolled in, though she did get sight of the fail certificate first.
And the poor lass ended up having to spend more than two grand putting it right. Something I do still feel guilty about, but amazingly enough, she still talks to me despite this.
(I would point out, K m'dear, if you are reading this, that I don't feel guilty enough to give your money back.)

And that was my one brush with a British sportscar. As a motorcar it was great. I often consider getting another, just for devilment. I'm thinking of an MG Midget this time.

But let me give you one piece of advice. If your relationship is a bit rocky, and you are spending a lot of time at the typewriter, and your partner is the sort of person who wears short skirts and works later than they really have to, do not buy her a red soft top sportscar that is rotting from the inside out.
For some reason such a vehicle will make her enormously attractive to other men.  Especially her gin-soaked aging lothario of a boss.

You'll be lucky if your relationship lasts longer than the track-rod ends....


Oh lordy. You can hire them out for weekends...

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