Why the things we love are rarely the things that look best from a distance.
When I was about six or seven, my favourite uncle, who was a proper car nut, came to visit. One of our neighbours owned a Triumph TR7 and I thought it was one of the coolest things I had ever seen. Low, wedge-shaped and futuristic, it looked exotic in a way that felt almost foreign to a child growing up on a quiet street.
He took one look at it and pronounced it ‘a sheep in wolf’s clothing.’
I nodded along enthusiastically, assuming he agreed with me. It took years before I understood that he wasn’t admiring it but pointing out the gap between how something presents itself and what it is.
The first love
A couple of years later, when I was nine or ten, my dad owned a British Racing Green Ford Cortina 2.3 Ghia, one of the hot cars of its time, roughly the equivalent of a Focus RS now. That was my first true love affair with cars, not because it was perfect, but because it lived a life.
Some of my earliest memories of that car are quiet ones: helping my dad fit fog lamps, passing tools, holding things steady while he tightened something into place. I remember him respraying one of the doors while I hovered nearby, supposedly assisting again. He worked long hours at the time and I didn’t get to spend as much time with him as I would have liked, so those small stretches of shared focus mattered. The car became a place where time slowed down and moments together were shared.
Then it developed a second life.
One day my dad drove the Cortina into Enfield for a meeting, only to return and find it gone. After a few days we got a call from the police. They had found it. It had been used as a getaway car in a bank robbery. The police recovered it and parked it somewhere safe, ready for him to collect the following weekend.
Before he could, we got another call. The car had been stolen again and used in another bank job. This time it did not have such a tidy ending. The thieves torched it and disappeared with the money.
I remember the strange mix of shock and pride I felt. Something we had owned, something I had held tools against, had become part of something larger and more dramatic than our quiet cul-de-sac. It was absurd and slightly tragic, but it sealed the car in memory. It stopped being transport and became legend.
I don’t think I understood any of this at the time. I just knew that cars could somehow acquire meaning far beyond what they were worth, how fast they went or whether somebody else thought they were any good. You could become attached to the history around them, and once that happened the usual measures of whether a car was ‘good’ became strangely irrelevant.
The Lotus
Years later, the Lotus taught me a different version of the same thing.
It was an Autumn Gold Lotus Elise 111R, one of only ten in the world. Its previous owner, who I believe was a career criminal, had spent thousands tuning it, possibly tens of thousands. By the time it reached me it already had a mythology attached to it. It was rare, slightly ridiculous and much more serious underneath than it first appeared.
Owning it was intoxicating in a way that is difficult to describe without sounding melodramatic. Every drive felt heightened, as though the volume of ordinary life had been turned up a few notches. At full chat it was visceral. The 2bular exhaust was absurdly loud and genuinely rang your ears, which made every tunnel irresistible. In the wet it demanded constant attention, the rear stepping out if you were careless or complacent, reminding you very quickly who was in charge. It did not flatter you or smooth over mistakes. It revealed them.
People stopped you constantly. They asked to sit in it, wanted you to blip the throttle, told you stories about the one they nearly bought or the one they wished they still had. I loved that. It even ended up with its own Instagram feed, autoeroticaffixation, documenting the steady stream of people who wanted to climb into it, photograph it or simply stand next to it for a while. There was something slightly ridiculous and wonderful about owning a machine that generated that much feeling in complete strangers.
It was also inconvenient, fragile and occasionally exhausting to own.
It was vandalised while I was visiting a friend in Spain. The garage that repaired it kept it for weeks and still made a mess of the job, which left me arguing and chasing for months afterwards. Then someone reversed into it with a tow bar and the whole process began again. Weeks without the car, twice. Each time I found myself weighing the hassle against the thrill and realising that, irrationally perhaps, I still chose the thrill.
The car gave intensity freely. The cost came quietly and repeatedly.
I think that was when I began to notice the distinction more clearly. I could admire a technically brilliant car, or something faster, cleaner and objectively better, without particularly wanting it. The Elise was different. I knew exactly what was wrong with it. In some ways the faults were impossible to ignore, but knowing them did not weaken the attachment. If anything, they became part of it.
There is probably something slightly uncomfortable in that if you extend the analogy too far, so I won’t. I don’t think suffering is evidence of love, and I certainly don’t think flaws become virtues simply because we become attached to them. But I do think familiarity changes the calculation. Once you understand something properly, you stop relating to an idealised version of it and start relating to the thing itself.
What matters now
Now I own a 2012 MINI JCW.
On paper it does not belong in the same conversation as an Elise. It is heavier, more practical and much less dramatic. I can put things in it. I can leave it somewhere without spending quite so much time wondering what fresh disaster will be waiting when I come back. But it still has a hint of the Hot Wheels sensibility I loved as a child, wrapped in enough practicality to feel honest about where I am now.
That matters more to me than I would once have expected.
I still like cars with character. I still like things that feel slightly improbable, that have some tension between what they are and what they are trying to be. But I no longer need the relationship to be quite so demanding. Perhaps that is age, or experience, or just getting better at recognising the difference between intensity and value.
I am aware that this may sound like I am talking about cars when I am really talking about myself. That is probably true. Cars are simply a useful way to talk about love without becoming sentimental. They let me think about attachment, care, frustration and loyalty in a space where the stakes are manageable.
The Cortina mattered because of my dad and everything that happened around it. The Elise mattered partly because it demanded something from me. The MINI matters because it still has character without requiring quite so much sacrifice.
None of them were perfect, and that increasingly feels beside the point.
The things I have loved most have rarely been the things that looked best from a distance. They have been the things I came to know properly, with all the history, irritation and compromise that implies.
I learned that through machines long before I understood it in people.
