Hi all,
Copied my Imp thread over earlier, so started to copy one of my many BX threads too. Going to be a bit of a gap in it while I sort some pics out, as it looks like I used Photobucket for some of the hosting. DOH!
Anyways, here is how it started:
SPOILER ALERT - Only read if you're struggling to sleep.
Yeah, I know. ANOTHER BX readers thread by me. PH isn't exactly short of content - 3 or 4 threads in readers section is more than enough, along with the fact that if a thread arises about the 1980's in GG, someone mentions a BX 16v, usually messrs marshphantom, or s m (though what they add to the discussion is often interesting all the same) - featuring the mostly-forgotten 80's French relic.
I've got two others running already (the GT mini-resto one which is fairly current, and my 16v which will do nothing for the next couple of years) but being that this car is consuming a lot of my car-related freetime and thought, I might as well do this. Besides, this is a full on warts & all blog, from the beginning. I suspect most people won't have even got this far, but it's going to be a fairly detailed war and peace affair, just to warn you now!
There are a small band of fans of the BX though, and being that I'm finding PH very useful for sharing the trials and tribulations of playing with old cars (I do have other cars besides BXs, honest) I thought I'd do a thread on a car I've been more excited to own than most. If nothing else it stops me wittering on to others who get very bored very quickly, and it's something to do at lunchtime!
So the special BX? Well, in truth, this car is the special BX:
In fact, to say this is the special BX is misleading. It's the special car. The one where it all kicked off. So this thread is all about that car? No, that car is dead, but it's because of that car that the car I'm going to blog about is special. In fact, it's because of that car that many of the circumstances that have arisen in my life are in place. Sounds far fetched, yeah, only I really don't think it is, in a sort of Back To The Future kind of way.
Wind back to 1983. I get born. Wind a little bit forward from there, and I'm about 2 or 3 years old. I'm starting to show an interest in cars. I don't really come from a petrolheadish sort of family. No interests in motorsports, Mum thinks cars are ways of getting from A-B and doesn't even drive. Dad likes techy stuff, has a passion for trains and takes a passing interest in cars, though he'd freely admit he doesn't have petrol running through his veins. In the circumstances, any interest I've developed as a toddler in cars is purely down to me, with none of the external influences that so many petrols are treated to (including my own kids).
The car of the day is a blue Marina 1.8 saloon (which I have pictures of somewhere).
edit! here's the Marina of justice, with yours truly inside. The driveway is still stained with blue Hammerite my Dad used to paint over the rust with, and that was proper Hammerite that actually worked. Not the watered down stuff you get today!:
It's replaced with an orange Talbot Alpine hatchback, which I have no images or memory of, other than it used to burn my legs if I wore shorts, as it had pleather seats. The Talbot was replaced with an Opel Kadett, aka a mk1 Astra 1.3 (or 1.6, can't remember). You can tell my Dad wasn't a car nut! Shortly after my sister was born in March 1988, we head out in the Kadett to my Grans on either Christmas Eve, or Boxing Day, or even New Year's day....something like that. It's recently rained and the road is slippy. We approach the now demolished Unigate dairy in Eastleigh, where a luton Transit milkfloat decides to pull out and cut across us. My Dad hits the anchors, but it's futile as it's so last minute. We skid gracefully into the side of the milkfloat. Words are exchanged, the Kadett will now barely move as the wings are crumped back onto the tyres and my baby sister is screaming. I was about 4, probably about to turn 5 years old, and remember it surprisingly well. I also remember my Dad saying he wanted the Kadett written-off, as he didn't really like it and was worried it'd come back with a curse word repair job, which it duly did after they refused to write it off!
So, Kadett reluctantly back on the driveway, Dad's decided he still wants a new motor. He's getting frisky now. Rumours of a 123-shape Mercedes, or a Rover SD1 surface. I knew the Rover as I had a Matchbox toy car, and knew it looked cool. I also know he liked big old Citroens, a result of being carted around in a Scout Leader's DS back in the 60's, doing various things that Scouts do (but apparently, not that). The DS was probably a bit old hat for 1988, and the CX sounds like it scared him off a little bit. Then I hear about this new car, the BX. There's a red one for sale in Southampton, and he thinks we should go and look at it. So we do. It was the car above. It was up for around £3500 on a corner forecourt, and the guy was happy to do a deal on the Kadett (probably guessing that then, like now, dealers didn't like Citroens and loved Vauxhalls!) My Dad tells me that the Citroen we went to see on Saturday is coming home on Tuesday. I get excited. I get even more excited when he told me the seats go up and down when you start the engine! (Imagine my disappointment when I discovered it was actually the whole that went up and down - Dad had tried to simplify it for me, but hadn't realised my tendency to be overly-literal had kicked in, even at that age.)
So, 'RPO' the BX comes home in 1988, and provides the hassle-free comfortable family transport for a family of five that only a plasticky, hot and stuffy BX can do (my memories of the BX in the back - always hot, seemed quite stuffy and had no nice new car smell. No smell at all, just stuffiness!)
Took us everywhere around the UK, that car. The picture above was taken at the West Somerset Railway (Bishops Lydeard). The one below in Bury, where my cousins moved to from Devon around the same time (how's that gonna be for a mixed accent?!)
My most common memory of it was just it sitting on the drive, backwards, because my Dad felt driving forwards into driveways was for fools. I used to think he was being difficult and pedantic, but thinking about it, he had a point. I'm getting old!:
So we've had 'RPO' the BX for a number of years now. 5 or 6, I think. I'm pushing on to starting secondary school in 1994, and I still love the car. For a small boy who was getting drunk at anything four-wheeled, the BX was pure crack! It had nutty dials. The suspension went up and down! All my mates parents had normal cars (I remember a D-reg Nissan Sunny, a C-reg Sierra 1.6L, another Sierra estate and a Cavalier (mk2, I think)) and the BX was just soooooooo much better. My rear window (yes, MINE) went up and down using electricity. We had central locking, meaning if Dad unlocked the car, my own door (yup, MY door - the nearside rear) opened straight away. He didn't have to lean in and pull the pins up - what loser does that?!
I'm borderline obsessed with 'RPO'. I'm always asking my Dad if I can sit in the car and make car noises. I'm planning to buy the car from him when I turn 17, and keep 'RPO' as my own car. To anyone else, a car, even a BX is ten-a-penny. Tools for the job. An inanimate object. To me, 'RPO' wasn't. He had character! He was a member of the family. So when that fateful day in October 1994 occurred, I took it badly.
I was off school, ill (actually ill, I think). It was about 9:30am and I was in my room. My brother and sister had gone to school, and my Dad had left for work at the Ordnance Survey in Southampton with his plastic briefcase at about 8:40am, like always. The phonecall was odd, but I didn't think much of it. My mum got off the phone and came to see me to let me know that it was Dad on the phone, and he'd been in a crash on the way to work. She was quick to point out he was ok, but in guilt-riddled honesty I had already kind of assumed he was ok, and was more worried about 'RPO'!
His crash was on the M271, Nursling junction, so the recovery lorry had him back again by about 10:15 - 10:30am. I heard it coming (single-pane glass, wooden window frame!) and ran outside to survey the car. It was nose-first on the transporter, so I ran past the back and round to the front, where I saw my Dad. "There's no damage!" I immediately exclaimed. And indeed, the front was fine. "It's round the back" he said. I moved to the rear, where I had already ran past having seen nothing obvious. I couldn't see the damage, so he came to show me. I just said, oh well that's nothing, a garage can fix that. I could tell by his face, and his responses that he thought it was more serious. Turned out that he'd left the M271 at the Nursling junction, and a young nurse in a black mk4 Escort popular didn't stop when he did! My Dad's the sort of guy to turn the power off at the plug every night, on every appliance. Because of this, he's also the type to keep a camera in the glovebox for emergencies! The Escort was a wreck, as shown by the photos my Dad took of it, the road (to show no skidmarks) and the back of the BX (complete with plastic briefcase):
The reality? It was ruined. MY door wouldn't open, the boot wouldn't open, the boot floor had a hump bigger than the one I developed over the whole thing, and the car was about 3-4in shorter than when it left the Rennes factory. The towbar was to blame, according to the insurance assessor. Apparently it threw the impact into the rear chassis rails directly, bypassing the impact-structure.
I learned the hard way what Insurance Write-Off meant. 'RPO' was dead, sat on our driveway while the insurance company fought with my Dad over a settlement fee. Eventually, I think around £900 was agreed.
In the meantime, my crushing blow had been softened slightly by the arrival of the new car. Dad had gone nuts, and decided to buy a 4 year old Citroen XM. A very early model, as with the BX. The difference with the XM and the BX, is that the XM was a nightmare. I loved it, but we all grew to tire of it and the new faults it seemed to develop each week. To add insult to injury, the XM was delivered on 9th December 1994 (still remember the date), and the BX wasn't removed by the scrapman until the end of December, possibly January. So we had the smashed up, but reliable BX, and the troublesome but not smashed up XM. I actually remember my Dad saying he wished someone would drive into it with a lorry for him!
The BX had a fitting send off. My Dad had let me and friends play in the car while it sat smashed up on the driveway, and in the final game we ever had in it, we begin (trying) to push the car up and down the drive while steering it. Sadly, I didn't have the hang of steering at 11years old, and steered it partially onto the lawn. The suspension was fully sunk and the car ended up beached across the driveway. The XM couldn't get back on there that final night, and the BX lay strewn diagonally across the house!
The next day, the BX was due to leave. I was ill, so couldn't go to school (I know, what are the chances!?) Part of me thinks I should have just gone. My Dad even patted it on the bonnet as he left for work, and I even think he whispered 'thanks' to it! I could have done the same, but I wasn't particularly enjoying secondary school, and I have a feeling that if I'd have gone it, I might have been stewing all day. In the end I bunked it. I'm sure my Mum and Dad knew I was faking it, but they let it slide. Around 10:30, about the time it came back on the tow truck after that crash, a massive car transporter arrived. Two burly blokes got out, knocked the door, signed some paperwork and my Mum gave them the keys. They then turned to look at the beached BX and man-handled it off of the driveway. It scraped and screeched down the drop-kerb, being so low that it ground out on the manhole cover in the middle of the street. It was like it was being dragged away for slaughter, desperately gripping on to anything it could! For me, it has heart-wrenching. It was loaded onto the top deck, at the back, backwards, meaning the nose was looking at you as it drove off. I actually did burst into tears, and my Mum put an arm around me (while the big burly blokes looked and had a real 'WTF?!' look on their faces). As the truck drove off, I ran upstairs to my Mum and Dad's bedroom, as I knew the truck would pass by there on it's way out of the estate. As it pulled out onto the main road, it was the last time I saw the car. Little did I know what effect that car would have on me later in life, even to the point I used an entire lunchbreak to write a million words to a load of people I don't know about something they don't care about! But it did.
How?
Well, I met my wife through cars. I had a brand new Saxo in 2002, which I sold in 2004 for a 1990 BX 16v (the one I own today). I had a Haynes Max Power manual which I wanted a fiver for, and she wanted to buy it. We met in a Harvester car park, instantly clicked and after a year of messing about (possibly me trying to fool around with other girls as much as I could, as I felt there was a chance that if I ended up getting together with her, it would probably get serious enough to last for good!) I was right, it has.
Through her, I have three wonderful kids, a new life in a nice area and so far 33% of my life has been with her. The life I have today, I wouldn't have if I hadn't met her.
(I never got the fiver.)
And here we go....
I wouldn't have met her if I wasn't selling a Saxo manual.
I wouldn't have the manual if I didn't have a Saxo.
I wouldn't have had the Saxo if I hadn't bought a dud AX GT that failed and made me want to get a brand new car.
I wouldn't have chosen the Saxo if I wasn't a Citroen fan. You could argue that loads of people chose Saxos, due to price, image at the time, deals etc, and that I would have done anyway. My wife was one of those who did the same, but I know I wouldn't. If my Dad's BX was a Cavalier, for example, I'd have got a Corsa, in all likeliness. I was that kind of kid. It's not a blindly following the badge type affair, today I genuinely have a love for the engineering of Citroens in their better days. I don't care much for any of their cars after 1999 either, but if my Dad had got the Vauxhall, I'd have been reading Vauxhall brochures in bed as an 8 year old, learning what BHP and engine cc was, not a Citroen one. I'm certain I'd have had a Vauxhall-bias, or whatever other brand it may have been. The fact that it was BX only served to take my growing fascination with cars, and amplify it with something more interesting than the normal hatches of the day.
So, if I didn't buy the AX GT that begat the Saxo, I wouldn't have had the Saxo, and thus not met my wife. With no wife, no kids. I wouldn't be doing the job I'm doing either (the one I'm late back from lunch to do!)
And before that there was another AX GT. And a ZX. And my first car? I did manage to get a BX. The interest that 'RPO' had installed in me lasted until I bought my first car at 16 years old. It was only going to be a BX.
You could argue that if the milkman hadn't pulled out, none of this would have happened. You could argue if my parents hadn't met, this present day would be different. You could even argue that if the Titanic hadn't sunk, I wouldn't be here (it's true, I wouldn't, but that's not for now!)
The fact is, that the earliest car-related turning point in my little history and my insignificant life, is that car. In terms of car-related stuff, it's the furthest I can go back and say for sure, that history would be different if my Dad hadn't bought that car.
But that car is dead. Long dead. I mourned, and I got over it (I know, doesn't like it, huh?) All I have left are a few photos, memories like we all do of cars from our youth. I've also got a rear number plate, which my Dad removed the day before it got taken away and gave to me, along with a key fob and one or two other bits. But no car.
And, I'd never be likely to ever have a car like that, too. The BX mk1 was only produced in RHD form from the 3rd quarter of 1983 until mid-1986. The mk2 lasted much longer. As a result, the mk1 is a rare beast. Today, my Dad has the GT I'm doing up, and that's a very rare car.
However, the chances of finding a 1983, A-reg, manual, red BX 16TRS? Very, very slim. I'd got close with a grey 16RS of 1985 (quite a nice one, actually), and a burgandy 16TRS Auto, (not so nice) also of 1985. Neither are a red, 1983 A-reg 16TRS manual though. I only knew of one car, and that car was going nowhere according to it's owner. I always said one day that I would own such a BX, though deep down I knew I'd never find one.
I certainly didn't think that one would find me! I'll fill in the next part later, and go back to work!
Copied my Imp thread over earlier, so started to copy one of my many BX threads too. Going to be a bit of a gap in it while I sort some pics out, as it looks like I used Photobucket for some of the hosting. DOH!
Anyways, here is how it started:
SPOILER ALERT - Only read if you're struggling to sleep.
Yeah, I know. ANOTHER BX readers thread by me. PH isn't exactly short of content - 3 or 4 threads in readers section is more than enough, along with the fact that if a thread arises about the 1980's in GG, someone mentions a BX 16v, usually messrs marshphantom, or s m (though what they add to the discussion is often interesting all the same) - featuring the mostly-forgotten 80's French relic.
I've got two others running already (the GT mini-resto one which is fairly current, and my 16v which will do nothing for the next couple of years) but being that this car is consuming a lot of my car-related freetime and thought, I might as well do this. Besides, this is a full on warts & all blog, from the beginning. I suspect most people won't have even got this far, but it's going to be a fairly detailed war and peace affair, just to warn you now!
There are a small band of fans of the BX though, and being that I'm finding PH very useful for sharing the trials and tribulations of playing with old cars (I do have other cars besides BXs, honest) I thought I'd do a thread on a car I've been more excited to own than most. If nothing else it stops me wittering on to others who get very bored very quickly, and it's something to do at lunchtime!
So the special BX? Well, in truth, this car is the special BX:
In fact, to say this is the special BX is misleading. It's the special car. The one where it all kicked off. So this thread is all about that car? No, that car is dead, but it's because of that car that the car I'm going to blog about is special. In fact, it's because of that car that many of the circumstances that have arisen in my life are in place. Sounds far fetched, yeah, only I really don't think it is, in a sort of Back To The Future kind of way.
Wind back to 1983. I get born. Wind a little bit forward from there, and I'm about 2 or 3 years old. I'm starting to show an interest in cars. I don't really come from a petrolheadish sort of family. No interests in motorsports, Mum thinks cars are ways of getting from A-B and doesn't even drive. Dad likes techy stuff, has a passion for trains and takes a passing interest in cars, though he'd freely admit he doesn't have petrol running through his veins. In the circumstances, any interest I've developed as a toddler in cars is purely down to me, with none of the external influences that so many petrols are treated to (including my own kids).
The car of the day is a blue Marina 1.8 saloon (which I have pictures of somewhere).
edit! here's the Marina of justice, with yours truly inside. The driveway is still stained with blue Hammerite my Dad used to paint over the rust with, and that was proper Hammerite that actually worked. Not the watered down stuff you get today!:
It's replaced with an orange Talbot Alpine hatchback, which I have no images or memory of, other than it used to burn my legs if I wore shorts, as it had pleather seats. The Talbot was replaced with an Opel Kadett, aka a mk1 Astra 1.3 (or 1.6, can't remember). You can tell my Dad wasn't a car nut! Shortly after my sister was born in March 1988, we head out in the Kadett to my Grans on either Christmas Eve, or Boxing Day, or even New Year's day....something like that. It's recently rained and the road is slippy. We approach the now demolished Unigate dairy in Eastleigh, where a luton Transit milkfloat decides to pull out and cut across us. My Dad hits the anchors, but it's futile as it's so last minute. We skid gracefully into the side of the milkfloat. Words are exchanged, the Kadett will now barely move as the wings are crumped back onto the tyres and my baby sister is screaming. I was about 4, probably about to turn 5 years old, and remember it surprisingly well. I also remember my Dad saying he wanted the Kadett written-off, as he didn't really like it and was worried it'd come back with a curse word repair job, which it duly did after they refused to write it off!
So, Kadett reluctantly back on the driveway, Dad's decided he still wants a new motor. He's getting frisky now. Rumours of a 123-shape Mercedes, or a Rover SD1 surface. I knew the Rover as I had a Matchbox toy car, and knew it looked cool. I also know he liked big old Citroens, a result of being carted around in a Scout Leader's DS back in the 60's, doing various things that Scouts do (but apparently, not that). The DS was probably a bit old hat for 1988, and the CX sounds like it scared him off a little bit. Then I hear about this new car, the BX. There's a red one for sale in Southampton, and he thinks we should go and look at it. So we do. It was the car above. It was up for around £3500 on a corner forecourt, and the guy was happy to do a deal on the Kadett (probably guessing that then, like now, dealers didn't like Citroens and loved Vauxhalls!) My Dad tells me that the Citroen we went to see on Saturday is coming home on Tuesday. I get excited. I get even more excited when he told me the seats go up and down when you start the engine! (Imagine my disappointment when I discovered it was actually the whole that went up and down - Dad had tried to simplify it for me, but hadn't realised my tendency to be overly-literal had kicked in, even at that age.)
So, 'RPO' the BX comes home in 1988, and provides the hassle-free comfortable family transport for a family of five that only a plasticky, hot and stuffy BX can do (my memories of the BX in the back - always hot, seemed quite stuffy and had no nice new car smell. No smell at all, just stuffiness!)
Took us everywhere around the UK, that car. The picture above was taken at the West Somerset Railway (Bishops Lydeard). The one below in Bury, where my cousins moved to from Devon around the same time (how's that gonna be for a mixed accent?!)
My most common memory of it was just it sitting on the drive, backwards, because my Dad felt driving forwards into driveways was for fools. I used to think he was being difficult and pedantic, but thinking about it, he had a point. I'm getting old!:
So we've had 'RPO' the BX for a number of years now. 5 or 6, I think. I'm pushing on to starting secondary school in 1994, and I still love the car. For a small boy who was getting drunk at anything four-wheeled, the BX was pure crack! It had nutty dials. The suspension went up and down! All my mates parents had normal cars (I remember a D-reg Nissan Sunny, a C-reg Sierra 1.6L, another Sierra estate and a Cavalier (mk2, I think)) and the BX was just soooooooo much better. My rear window (yes, MINE) went up and down using electricity. We had central locking, meaning if Dad unlocked the car, my own door (yup, MY door - the nearside rear) opened straight away. He didn't have to lean in and pull the pins up - what loser does that?!
I'm borderline obsessed with 'RPO'. I'm always asking my Dad if I can sit in the car and make car noises. I'm planning to buy the car from him when I turn 17, and keep 'RPO' as my own car. To anyone else, a car, even a BX is ten-a-penny. Tools for the job. An inanimate object. To me, 'RPO' wasn't. He had character! He was a member of the family. So when that fateful day in October 1994 occurred, I took it badly.
I was off school, ill (actually ill, I think). It was about 9:30am and I was in my room. My brother and sister had gone to school, and my Dad had left for work at the Ordnance Survey in Southampton with his plastic briefcase at about 8:40am, like always. The phonecall was odd, but I didn't think much of it. My mum got off the phone and came to see me to let me know that it was Dad on the phone, and he'd been in a crash on the way to work. She was quick to point out he was ok, but in guilt-riddled honesty I had already kind of assumed he was ok, and was more worried about 'RPO'!
His crash was on the M271, Nursling junction, so the recovery lorry had him back again by about 10:15 - 10:30am. I heard it coming (single-pane glass, wooden window frame!) and ran outside to survey the car. It was nose-first on the transporter, so I ran past the back and round to the front, where I saw my Dad. "There's no damage!" I immediately exclaimed. And indeed, the front was fine. "It's round the back" he said. I moved to the rear, where I had already ran past having seen nothing obvious. I couldn't see the damage, so he came to show me. I just said, oh well that's nothing, a garage can fix that. I could tell by his face, and his responses that he thought it was more serious. Turned out that he'd left the M271 at the Nursling junction, and a young nurse in a black mk4 Escort popular didn't stop when he did! My Dad's the sort of guy to turn the power off at the plug every night, on every appliance. Because of this, he's also the type to keep a camera in the glovebox for emergencies! The Escort was a wreck, as shown by the photos my Dad took of it, the road (to show no skidmarks) and the back of the BX (complete with plastic briefcase):
The reality? It was ruined. MY door wouldn't open, the boot wouldn't open, the boot floor had a hump bigger than the one I developed over the whole thing, and the car was about 3-4in shorter than when it left the Rennes factory. The towbar was to blame, according to the insurance assessor. Apparently it threw the impact into the rear chassis rails directly, bypassing the impact-structure.
I learned the hard way what Insurance Write-Off meant. 'RPO' was dead, sat on our driveway while the insurance company fought with my Dad over a settlement fee. Eventually, I think around £900 was agreed.
In the meantime, my crushing blow had been softened slightly by the arrival of the new car. Dad had gone nuts, and decided to buy a 4 year old Citroen XM. A very early model, as with the BX. The difference with the XM and the BX, is that the XM was a nightmare. I loved it, but we all grew to tire of it and the new faults it seemed to develop each week. To add insult to injury, the XM was delivered on 9th December 1994 (still remember the date), and the BX wasn't removed by the scrapman until the end of December, possibly January. So we had the smashed up, but reliable BX, and the troublesome but not smashed up XM. I actually remember my Dad saying he wished someone would drive into it with a lorry for him!
The BX had a fitting send off. My Dad had let me and friends play in the car while it sat smashed up on the driveway, and in the final game we ever had in it, we begin (trying) to push the car up and down the drive while steering it. Sadly, I didn't have the hang of steering at 11years old, and steered it partially onto the lawn. The suspension was fully sunk and the car ended up beached across the driveway. The XM couldn't get back on there that final night, and the BX lay strewn diagonally across the house!
The next day, the BX was due to leave. I was ill, so couldn't go to school (I know, what are the chances!?) Part of me thinks I should have just gone. My Dad even patted it on the bonnet as he left for work, and I even think he whispered 'thanks' to it! I could have done the same, but I wasn't particularly enjoying secondary school, and I have a feeling that if I'd have gone it, I might have been stewing all day. In the end I bunked it. I'm sure my Mum and Dad knew I was faking it, but they let it slide. Around 10:30, about the time it came back on the tow truck after that crash, a massive car transporter arrived. Two burly blokes got out, knocked the door, signed some paperwork and my Mum gave them the keys. They then turned to look at the beached BX and man-handled it off of the driveway. It scraped and screeched down the drop-kerb, being so low that it ground out on the manhole cover in the middle of the street. It was like it was being dragged away for slaughter, desperately gripping on to anything it could! For me, it has heart-wrenching. It was loaded onto the top deck, at the back, backwards, meaning the nose was looking at you as it drove off. I actually did burst into tears, and my Mum put an arm around me (while the big burly blokes looked and had a real 'WTF?!' look on their faces). As the truck drove off, I ran upstairs to my Mum and Dad's bedroom, as I knew the truck would pass by there on it's way out of the estate. As it pulled out onto the main road, it was the last time I saw the car. Little did I know what effect that car would have on me later in life, even to the point I used an entire lunchbreak to write a million words to a load of people I don't know about something they don't care about! But it did.
How?
Well, I met my wife through cars. I had a brand new Saxo in 2002, which I sold in 2004 for a 1990 BX 16v (the one I own today). I had a Haynes Max Power manual which I wanted a fiver for, and she wanted to buy it. We met in a Harvester car park, instantly clicked and after a year of messing about (possibly me trying to fool around with other girls as much as I could, as I felt there was a chance that if I ended up getting together with her, it would probably get serious enough to last for good!) I was right, it has.
Through her, I have three wonderful kids, a new life in a nice area and so far 33% of my life has been with her. The life I have today, I wouldn't have if I hadn't met her.
(I never got the fiver.)
And here we go....
I wouldn't have met her if I wasn't selling a Saxo manual.
I wouldn't have the manual if I didn't have a Saxo.
I wouldn't have had the Saxo if I hadn't bought a dud AX GT that failed and made me want to get a brand new car.
I wouldn't have chosen the Saxo if I wasn't a Citroen fan. You could argue that loads of people chose Saxos, due to price, image at the time, deals etc, and that I would have done anyway. My wife was one of those who did the same, but I know I wouldn't. If my Dad's BX was a Cavalier, for example, I'd have got a Corsa, in all likeliness. I was that kind of kid. It's not a blindly following the badge type affair, today I genuinely have a love for the engineering of Citroens in their better days. I don't care much for any of their cars after 1999 either, but if my Dad had got the Vauxhall, I'd have been reading Vauxhall brochures in bed as an 8 year old, learning what BHP and engine cc was, not a Citroen one. I'm certain I'd have had a Vauxhall-bias, or whatever other brand it may have been. The fact that it was BX only served to take my growing fascination with cars, and amplify it with something more interesting than the normal hatches of the day.
So, if I didn't buy the AX GT that begat the Saxo, I wouldn't have had the Saxo, and thus not met my wife. With no wife, no kids. I wouldn't be doing the job I'm doing either (the one I'm late back from lunch to do!)
And before that there was another AX GT. And a ZX. And my first car? I did manage to get a BX. The interest that 'RPO' had installed in me lasted until I bought my first car at 16 years old. It was only going to be a BX.
You could argue that if the milkman hadn't pulled out, none of this would have happened. You could argue if my parents hadn't met, this present day would be different. You could even argue that if the Titanic hadn't sunk, I wouldn't be here (it's true, I wouldn't, but that's not for now!)
The fact is, that the earliest car-related turning point in my little history and my insignificant life, is that car. In terms of car-related stuff, it's the furthest I can go back and say for sure, that history would be different if my Dad hadn't bought that car.
But that car is dead. Long dead. I mourned, and I got over it (I know, doesn't like it, huh?) All I have left are a few photos, memories like we all do of cars from our youth. I've also got a rear number plate, which my Dad removed the day before it got taken away and gave to me, along with a key fob and one or two other bits. But no car.
And, I'd never be likely to ever have a car like that, too. The BX mk1 was only produced in RHD form from the 3rd quarter of 1983 until mid-1986. The mk2 lasted much longer. As a result, the mk1 is a rare beast. Today, my Dad has the GT I'm doing up, and that's a very rare car.
However, the chances of finding a 1983, A-reg, manual, red BX 16TRS? Very, very slim. I'd got close with a grey 16RS of 1985 (quite a nice one, actually), and a burgandy 16TRS Auto, (not so nice) also of 1985. Neither are a red, 1983 A-reg 16TRS manual though. I only knew of one car, and that car was going nowhere according to it's owner. I always said one day that I would own such a BX, though deep down I knew I'd never find one.
I certainly didn't think that one would find me! I'll fill in the next part later, and go back to work!
