The cars of happiest memory are the first

I can go for weeks without bumping into the electricity man. And then our paths will cross three or four times in a row. He is always walking his two King Charleses; I am walking our two breed-unspecifieds.

We call him "the electricity man." He has in fact retired some years ago, but "electricity man" certainly wouldn't have done justice to his lofty status as a former executive of Scottish Power, the organization that sees to it that we have an endless supply with which to run our spotlights, freezers, and computers.

Cars, not electricity, were our topic of conversation tonight. Some evenings the electricity man and I become so interested in our exchanges that we extend our walk by a block or two to make sure we have fully exhausted the theme. When, on this night, I returned home much later than usual, my wife was getting ready for bed.

"So who did you meet tonight?" - her voice wafted from the depths of the bathroom.

"The electricity man. Do you know that his very first car cost him £15!"

Laughter from the bathroom.

Think of it - £15. The electricity man and I confessed to one another that we couldn't quite keep up with today's monetary values. What would £15 buy today? A modest book. A main course in an unpretentious restaurant. Parking at an airport for a day or two.

"Mind you, it was a Jowett Bradford truck," he'd told me, "and I spent a lot of time trying to make it work."

I could see Tony (the electricity man's real name) was enjoying our conversation. Sometimes when I see him approaching down a local avenue, he reminds me of Keats's knight: "alone and palely loitering." This misleading appearance of melancholy may have some connection with his not being a Yorkshire man (as I am), but a Lancashire man. Not that this is his fault. However, he palpably cheers up if our chat gets hold of him.

"Oh, Jowett!" I exclaimed. "Oh, yes!"

Four of us from university once made a rather cramped, very warm five-week tour of Italy and France one summer in a Jowett Javelin. It belonged to the only one of us with any real sense of style (not me). This car, shaped like a small dark whale, was not only British built, it was Yorkshire built. It was very sturdy, as a Yorkshire car should be, but it had not forgotten that a car ought to be streamlined.

These were the days when it was still feasible for a provincial car manufacturer to survive. The global situation of today, when German car companies own British companies, and British companies build Japanese cars, and Vauxhall Motors belongs to General Motors, was as yet in the unimaginable future.

The Jowett Javelin stood up to the strain of our cultural European trail pretty well. Only one awkward occurrence sticks in my mind. We were on the way to Bologna, Italy, and a tire went flat on us. None of us could turn a single one of the bolts holding the wheel in place. A massive Italian truck driver drew up and offered to help. But all he managed to do was break the wrench. He shrugged apologetically and drove away. We now had even less leverage. Those sturdy, Yorkshire-built bolts were not going to give in that easily!

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