When I was a girl in the 1970s, we didn’t have a car. We always took the train from our home in Bristol to the deep west of Devon and Cornwall. But when I got together with my third husband in 1995, I discovered the joy of driving — or rather, being driven, as I certainly wasn’t going to be the (sober) adult in the room if I could help it.
We acquired a black Mini (‘Geoff’) and most summers we’d motor all the way from Brighton to Portmeirion, in Wales. Not only was Geoff a Mini, but he even had black and white Union Jacks on the back of his mirrors; driving into the heartbreakingly beautiful Prisoner village in him felt very glamorous.
Life rarely seems more cinematic than when music you love plays in a car, and cars have contributed more classic songs to the canon than anything except love.
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