It was a shitty brown Triumph Dolomite so the moniker might seen apposite.  It wasn’t.  Shitty it might have been but flying it didn’t.

I had it for a couple of years in the 80’s having bought it second-hand.  Again, the phrase “second-hand” doesn’t really do it justice.  It was about as second-hand as Lilo Lil.

I enjoyed its company though albeit that it displayed all the proud workmanship and reliability you learned to expect from British Leyland, and it still gives me fond memories.

For instance, the engine compartment.  Compared with today’s cars where you can’t get a playing card between the turbo thrust synthesising hose and the torque condenser gurgling units, the Dolomite’s engine compartment was empty.  Several cats could have curled up in its many warm and vacuous recesses.  Anyone dab-hand enough could have done their own top flange replacement with just an oily Haynes Workshop Manual.  Wasted on me, of course.

Another memory is of the time around one Christmas when I was stopped by an unmarked police car, obviously on the look-out for an easy drink-drive catch.

“Is there a problem?” I asked him.

After he’d looked around the car and detected no signs of my having had a drink he said, “Just checking, sir.  There’s been a spate of thefts of this type of vehicle recently”.

I’m afraid I snotted.  But I did so so genuinely and without any sense of derision that he had the good grace to look embarrassed.  I drove off thinking, “I bet these Flying Turds are being stolen to order for Arab sheikhs”.

Or then there were the times I was driving into the Executive Car Park at Donny Station.

When I was on Coal Board business a Young Turk like myself was entitled to travel First Class.  (Anyone who knows me would expect nothing less).

For £120 an Executive Ticket to London would get you breakfast and free parking in the Executive Car Park.  This meant you didn’t have to get piss-wet through like the rest of the raggy-taggy people did.

I cherish the memory of the many times I’d chug up to the barrier to be met a little man scurrying out of his hut, waving his arms at me and yelling “Stop!”.  Then the sweet sensation of showing him my Exec Ticket and saying “Couldn’t give us a push, old man, could you?  Bloody things conked out”.

To the Manor Born.