The one with the Mini and the Golf

Today I thought I’d tell you about the best car I ever owned and, naturally, the worst one too. Conveniently, they were my first and second cars, which in hindsight feels like the motoring equivalent of starting with dessert and then being handed a plate of wet socks.

My first car was a Mini, and I absolutely loved it.

Technically, I bought it before I’d even passed my test, which probably tells you everything you need to know about the confidence levels involved. I’d been doing driving lessons, and every time we came back through town I’d see this Mini sitting up on the corner of a forecourt, almost like it had been placed there specifically to tempt me. It was red, it had little white wheels, and it looked fantastic. Not just nice. Properly cool.

The funny thing is, I hadn’t even wanted a Mini at first. My stepdad had been going on about them for ages, insisting that a Mini should be my first car because they were fun and full of character. At the time, I wasn’t especially bothered. Then I saw this one and suddenly I understood the obsession.

It had tiny ten-inch wheels, but they were really wide, which made it look brilliant. It also had a 1275 GT engine, and because the car was so small and light, it felt ridiculously quick. The steering wheel was a racing wheel, the whole thing felt lively, and for a first car it had far more personality than it had any right to.

Once I’d bought it, I spent the weeks before my test basically treating it like a shrine. Every weekend I’d be out there polishing it, cleaning the interior, messing with little bits and pieces, fitting a new stereo, changing the gear knob for a pool ball, hanging fluffy dice from the mirror, doing all the daft first-car things you’re supposed to do. It hadn’t gone anywhere, but it was immaculate.

Then I passed my test.

In fact, when my driving instructor dropped me home, I didn’t even go in the house first to tell anyone. I got out of his car, got straight into the Mini, and went for a drive simply because I could. That first drive was glorious. I decided to drive all the routes I’d probably be doing regularly, work, friends’ houses, relatives’ houses, just to get used to them on my own. I must have been out for about an hour and a half and I was loving every second of it.

Then, while I was stopped at a red light, someone in a brand new Citroën Saxo rolled into the back of me.

Not even dramatically. She pulled up behind me, then somehow let the car creep forward into mine. It didn’t leave so much as a mark on the Mini, but it absolutely wrecked the front bumper on her Saxo. We exchanged details, but that was pretty much the end of it. She’d driven into the back of me while I was stationary at a red light, which is about as open-and-shut as these things get. Still, having a crash on your first ever day driving alone does rather take the shine off the occasion.

Even so, I adored that car.

I used to drive around in it in the sun with the music blasting. I’d put in what felt like an absurdly overpowered stereo system for a Mini, eight speakers crammed into this tiny little car, bass shaking the whole thing like it was trying to peel itself off the road. The slightly unfortunate detail is that, alongside the expected indie stuff, I was also really into The Corrs at the time. So there was almost certainly a period where I became locally known as “that bloke in the Mini absolutely belting out Irish pop music.” Not ideal, but there we are.

The Mini and I got into a fair few adventures.

At one point, driving home from work with a couple of colleagues in the back, I completely misjudged a set of roadworks. It was one of those awkward junctions where the traffic control didn’t quite work the way I expected, and suddenly I found myself turning into oncoming traffic. The two lads in the back quite understandably started shouting, and rather than do the sensible thing and stop, I panicked and drove up onto the pavement, under some scaffolding by a pub, and somehow back onto the road on the other side.

It was one of those moments where, as soon as the adrenaline wears off, you realise you’ve behaved like a complete idiot. We pulled over, everyone got out, and one of the lads got into the driver’s seat and said, quite rightly, “Get in the back. I’m driving.” I was still such a new driver at that point, and it shook me badly enough that I didn’t drive again for a few days. Nothing actually happened, but it easily could have. The Mini had got me out of it mostly by being tiny enough to fit where a normal car wouldn’t.

Then there was the flood.

My stepdad and I had gone on a fishing trip to Wales, partly because it was a fishing trip and partly, I suspect, because it gave me a good excuse to do a longer drive in the Mini. On the way back, the rain was biblical. Proper motorway-disappearing-underwater sort of rain. We came over a stretch where the road dipped, and because it was dark you couldn’t really see the floodwater until it was too late.

Suddenly there were police in high-vis in the road, waving at people to slow down, and then we hit the water.

The car stalled immediately. Over a megaphone, someone shouted, “Do not get out of the car. Stay in the car.” Naturally, the first thing my stepdad did was get out of the car. This led to a shouting match between him and the police officer, who was trying to explain that the car would offer more protection than standing in the middle of a flooded motorway. Which, fair enough, is not really a point you want to be debating in real time.

Eventually the road was closed, the Mini was pushed out of the flood, and we ended up waiting for recovery. The recovery truck already had two cars on the back, so the driver offered to tow us to the next service station if I had a tow rope. Thanks to working in a garage, I did.

So off we went, being towed down the motorway.

Then, somehow, the driver forgot he was towing us. He slowed down, I slowed down with him, and then he suddenly sped back up again. The rope snapped, and we were left freewheeling down the motorway at about 40 or 50 miles an hour with no engine running.

At that point, my stepdad started yelling at me to jam it into third gear and lift the clutch. I did, and the car bump-started itself while we were still moving. The engine sprang back into life, we pulled alongside the recovery truck, wound the window down, shouted “Thanks, mate!” and carried on driving, completely forgetting that we were dragging the tow rope behind us like some bizarre automotive tail.

That car was chaos in the best possible way.

One of the strangest things that ever happened with it involved a dead fish. At the garage where I worked, one of the lads had convinced himself I’d vandalised his fishing magazine by cutting up the title so it read “Crap World” instead of “Carp World.” To be clear, that wasn’t me. It was, however, exactly the kind of thing I would have done, which didn’t help my case.

So in revenge, he hid a dead fish in the Mini’s heater vent, fully expecting me to be driven mad by the smell.

What he hadn’t accounted for was my absolutely useless sense of smell.

Apparently that fish was in there for about six weeks. Six weeks. I never noticed. Nobody else mentioned it either, which means either they also didn’t notice or they thought the smell was somehow my fault and were too polite to say so. Eventually he gave up, marched me outside, opened it up, pulled out this revolting rotting fish and said, “That’s been in there for six weeks and you haven’t said anything.”

Honestly, I still think that’s more a medical story than a car story.

In the end, I had to get rid of the Mini. Not because I wanted to, but because things were changing with fuel. Back then, older cars could still use four-star petrol, which had lead in it. Once that fuel was phased out, my Mini would have needed converting to run properly on unleaded. That part was doable, and I probably would have paid for it, but the car was also starting to rust in places, particularly around panels that Minis are known for rotting on. One job became two, then three, then a growing pile of expense.

At around the same time, someone offered to swap me a Volkswagen Golf for it.

I was about nineteen or twenty, and the idea of upgrading to a bigger, five-door Golf sounded pretty appealing. The other bloke wanted my Mini mainly for the engine, which was relatively rare, and he already had another Mini shell to put it in. So I agreed.

Which brings us to the worst car I ever owned.

That Volkswagen Golf.

At first, it seemed fine. Not exciting, but fine. Then, after about a week, it began to reveal its true nature, which was apparently ongoing mechanical betrayal.

For starters, it felt old in a way that got worse the more time you spent with it. Everything squeaked. Everything felt tired. Then it started getting punctures constantly. I was working in a garage, so fixing them wasn’t the end of the world, but when you’re dealing with punctures nearly every week you do begin to wonder whether the car has offended someone.

The bigger problem, though, was reverse gear.

Randomly, and with no warning, the car would sometimes refuse to go into reverse. Then it would be absolutely fine again for a while. Then it would happen again. It turned out this was a known issue on that model, caused by a faulty linkage between the gear stick and the gearbox. It was such a known issue that Volkswagen had a quality programme for fixing it for free, even on older cars.

The trouble was, getting to the part properly involved taking out bits of the interior, and on my car enough of that had rusted or seized up that it would have cost more money than it was worth just to get access. There was apparently a less official way of doing it, but Volkswagen wouldn’t do that. So I was stuck with a car that might, at any given moment, decide reverse was no longer one of its interests.

And then came the grand finale.

One day I was driving along at about 50 miles an hour and went to change gear. At that exact moment, the linkage gave up completely. The gear stick literally dropped through the floor of the car and started dragging along the road underneath me.

Not metaphorically. Literally.

It carved a trench into the road, bent itself underneath the car, sent sparks flying, and started chewing into the interior while I tried to wrestle the car over to the side. I managed to get it off the road eventually, but it was spectacularly bad. The sort of failure that makes you sit in silence for a few seconds afterwards and just stare ahead, as if your brain needs a moment to catch up with what has just happened.

That was the end of that car.

So yes, the best car I ever owned was my first one, a red Mini that was ridiculous, brilliant, unreliable in a charming way, and somehow full of adventures.

The worst was my second one, a Volkswagen Golf that seemed determined to mechanically disassemble itself one piece at a time until eventually it tried to eject the gear stick through the floor.

I still miss the Mini.

The Golf, not so much.