The cars of happiest memory are the first

'Eventually, one by one, though, they finally loosened," I told Tony, "which explains why we are not still stranded on that dusty hillside and also how we managed to reach Bologna in time to persuade a trattoria to serve us spaghetti Bolognese before midnight."

"Were you camping?" he asked.

"No. Youth hosteling."

"Ah," he said, Keats's sad knight exuberantly banished now, "Great days!"

I didn't want to spoil things by becoming too critically philosophical about days that I frankly recall as having fairly dire ups and downs, so I turned the subject back to cars.

"My first car was a Mini," I said.

The whole subject of first cars brings out something extraordinarily fond and foolish. Minis, built by the British Motor Corporation, were special. Their advent and popularity coincided happily with my father's great generosity as I finished college. I could never have found the £600 plus that a new Mini cost; the salary I received as a starting-out schoolteacher was less than £40 a month. That first car was the pride of my life. I was forever polishing every inch of its surface. The slightest mark - a spot of tar thrown up from the road, a fly on the windscreen - was a blemish that could not be tolerated. Since then, as car has succeeded car, my enthusiasm for car washing has subsided somewhat. Or, to put it another way, vanished.

Minis were small - they had tiny 10-inch wheels - but in those days small was beautiful. Unlike the parental car, it felt like a one-person vehicle, although it was amazing how many passengers and how much junk could be squashed into it. In my Mini I felt like someone who had been given the freedom of a city - only it was the freedom of the whole country, of the world!

"You could buy one of today's Minis," Tony said.

These 2003 cars, surprisingly bulky looking, with enormous wheels, have a top speed of well over 100 miles per hour. They cost £10,000 or more. They seem to me as much like a true Mini as a horse is like a Shetland pony. No doubt they are much more comfortable, better sprung, and so forth. But Minis were truly minimal. You were excitingly close to the road and the seats were surprisingly not as uncomfortable as you might think. As I charged up the only British highway then (only partially) built, the M1 from London to Northamptonshire where I worked, the engine would scream in high-pitched protest as I lead-footed it up to 60 mph, or even a straining 65 downhill.

"They were brilliant little cars," I laughed. Tony agreed wholeheartedly. But I suspect that neither of us would actually want to own one today. He has a VW Golf in his garage. In our driveway, when I walked the dogs round to the back door, I passed a Honda Civic. Jowetts and Minis, of happiest memory, sit in museums.

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