Car

I've always been car mad. I started buying Motor magazine when I was twelve. I ran long unrelenting campaigns for my dad to upgrade our family vehicle. I longed after the Vauxhall Victor Transcontinentals and the Puegot 504 estates and the Opel Rekord estates of old. Dad's choice in 1976 of a Chrysler Alpine (the first new car he had ever bought and only a year before his untimely death) was an inspired choice. I spent many hours in the front seat exploring all its buttons when I should have been studying for my O-grades. One of the last things we did together was to stick L plates on the Alpine on 16th February 1977, my 17th Birthday, when Dad taught me clutch control near the Shell tanks in Hawkhead Road, Paisley, two hundred metres from the town's cemetry - sadly, we buried him there exactly two months later. I also delighted in my mum buying an Alfa Romeo a few years later and took to my own very first car, a Citroen 2CV, with complete love....I still have it 30 years later! So you can imagine my joy to work today, all day long, in the Nissan Brand Centre here in Barcelona with top car executives of that firm on some of the challenges their industry faces. And then to return home for a beer and a read of Car magazine!