It's possible your used red Beetle, was the one I had too - sometime in the early '90s.

It used to belong to a young Sri Lankan who, when he was first wooing my sister (they went out for about 2 years, eventually), took her shopping in Neasden in it. Except the bloomin' thing broke down and he, frustrated that his machinery (equipment?) had thus shown him up in front of the girl he wanted to impress, abandoned it there, and took taxis for the rest of the day! He then went out and bought himself a reliable Japanese car. A few months later, when the two of them were at lunch at our place, he overheard my girlfriend saying she was thinking of getting a car and offered us the Beetle, still parked somewhere in Neasden. We took him up on the offer, and for the next year or so were the proud possessors of a love-bug. There was no heating, there was barely any trim, and we took off the bumbers in despair (legally, either you had bumpers in good condition, or none at all!), but it worked, in a way.

It was, of course, a delightfully basic vehicle and I had great fun pottering around it with a few simple tools and tuning the engine, tightening the doors, refitting the connection between the stepney and the windscreen washer bottle and so on. When one door came off, my friend (down from Bombay, and as much of a geek as me) and I took great pleasure in taking a single screw each off the other doors and using them to fix the last one back on.

They don't make cars like that any more. Today, you open the bonnet on one of them and reel back, aghast: it looks as much like a mechanism as a picture of a supermodel looks like the woman herself - bleary-eyed, first thing in the morning. Modern car innards are a definite look-but-don't-touch item, and in making them so, manufacturers have removed some of their heart. Tim was I could change a tyre, unassisted, with the entire family sat in the car (okay, granny would always ake the opportunity to run to the side of the road for a quick pee - damn embarrassing it was, too, because her eyesight was so bad she couldn't see us and therefore thought she herself was out of view, and hence was usually to be found squatting a mere metre or two from the car while we all averted our eyes) in a mere five minutes. Often less. These days I can't even get the nuts off the wheel without one of those pneumatic thingies. Talk about temps perdu eh?

We eventually gave the car to the girlfriend's younger brother. He eventually sold it, the soulless *&^^$""%^*. And that was the end of my motoring days. It was bicycles, bicycles all the way, with tin tacks strewn in my path like mad...

cheer

the sunshine warrior