The Sad Decease of a Cent-Six (106)

Some bastard burnt my Peugeot. As my mum's Canadian cousin would have said, despite being, of his own admission, only a damned colonial: It's an outrage.

This was the car in which I scaled the north face of the bridge over the Loire at Nantes while rehearsing a massive heart attack; the car whose handbrake fell off while practising sinking during a cataclysmic flood at Lyons; the car that threatened never to start in winter but always did; the car that had lovely simple things like windows that wound up and down, with a black plastic handle that always worked.

All those summer miles, windows down and still sweating, to the agreeable rattle and hum of a knackered old diesel doing about 4rpm. Now it has gone, dismembered and incinerated, the funeral pyre possibly witnessed only by a brainless bunch of Ariègeois sheep. Silence of the lambs eh? Watch it, O ye woolly ones, you too could end up on the barbecue.

The car that survived a incredible number of increasingly improbable, incredulous and unfeasible MoTs and control techniques, is now but a naked tin wreck identifiable only by its ashen chassis plate; all thanks to some nameless thieving gits. We go back a long way, me and that 106. I wish they still made cars like that.