30 cars - 50 years

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It also serves as a reminder of the bureaucratic DVLA rationale which encouraged (indeed exploited) the personal and cherished car registration plate market, only - with the complicity of Government - to impose petty and vindictive restrictions on the manner in which they are displayed.

Does anyone really believe, for instance, that ‘COMIC‘ is less memorable or identifiable than ‘COM 1C‘ as DVLA and police advisers claim? I'm sure Jimmy Tarbuck doesn't, nor does any reasonable person whose thinking process is unaffected by the distortions of the Whitehall mindset.

I taught my wife to drive in the A35, mostly along the ruler-straight roads of Team Valley Trading Estate usually at weekends when the factories and offices were closed, and also on the A1, into the North Pennines and Scotland. She quickly became a very practiced and proficient driver to such an extent that on her driving test the terrified examiner failed her for over-confidence. Sometimes, you just can't win.

Zany Zephyr-Zodiac
I think a touch of madness descended on the family for our next car, when we part-exchanged the A35 for a 1957 Ford Zephyr-Zodiac, a garish red and black 6-cylinder monster which only scraped (often literally) through the driveway gateposts with 3" to spare. Steering column gearchange, bench front seat, grinning chrome grilles front and rear, this was the epitome of appaling pseudo-Yankee taste which I can only attribute to a rush of blood.

It was an aberration we were very soon to regret when the gearbox disintegrated, and the £35 replacement bill brought us to the realisation that any upper-middle class pretensions we might harbour were really not for the likes of us.

If only we'd known, at today's values the registration plate would probably have bought ten Zodiacs. It was first registered to a Whitley Bay landlady as MTN 22, promptly christened 'Dinky Doo‘. MTN 22 almost concludes my record of fortuitous acquisitions of rare motors and some even rarer registrations, at a time when they really started to appreciate with dramatic effect.

Cheerful Cherub
This chronicle cannot end without our first purchase of a brand new car. It was a basic Morris Mini, Minor, a cheerful cherry red cherub blessed with registration 3479 DN, and predictably named Deanna on first sight. By paying cash I received a £35 discount off the list £565, not much by today's standards, but sufficient to buy petrol for the first few thousand miles.

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