This appeared to do wonders for my prospects because it was replaced by a Citroën 2CV and I’ve been in love with them ever since. The young ladies loved it too because it was fun, quirky and the roof peeled back. However while it may have made me more interesting to them, it was only in an entirely academic sense. I imagine they’d not realised they had someone sufficiently, well, strange to want to drive what Jasper Carrott once described as ‘an upturned corrugated pram on wheels’.
And then there was Ben. The chap alluded to in the first paragraph who could afford not to play the game. While we scratched and scrabbled around to put anything at even approximately worked on the road, Ben had a Ford Fiesta XR2. A brand new one, circular lights, pepper pot wheels, the lot. It is no exaggeration at all to say that while the rest of us had piles of barely mobile, inexactly assembled wreckage, Ben had a car. He also has a rather cool motorcycle (a Honda VT250F as you’re asking) and a daredevil granny with blue hair and an MGB roadster, but she’s another story.