“Would you like to enter your car into the show?”
Not quite what I expected to hear when I wound down the window on the bug on arriving at Escrick Park near York on Sunday. Had I even dreamt it was, I would have at least washed the car before heading up there for this year’s VW Field of Dreams! Maybe that makes me a bad owner, especially seeing as it was Betty’s 43rd birthday….
VW Northwest, held at Tatton Park in Cheshire is perhaps the largest VW show held in the north of England. In the 15 years since I last went to Tatton Park (sadly in my girlfriend at the time’s Peugeot 305), a number of other shows have established themselves in the north so I was really interested to see how the show has developed. And how would I be getting there this time? In the bug, with its lovely new engine of course!
It’s a strange old world, and it seems that despite the sheer numbers of cars they produced, the VW world is actually quite a small place. This evening, for example, I received a private message on the Early Bay forum from a chap who had seen a picture of the bug on a post on the forum in which I’d been ranting about the awful job they’d made of rebuilding a ’74 bug on Classic Car Rescue the previous evening (seriously, it was dreadful!). Nothing too strange about that you might think, people reply to forum posts the whole time after all. Well this guy seems to think that he might be one of Betty’s previous owners, and that’s why it’s so odd!
Seeing as I was nowhere near as hung over following Darryl and Jo’s wedding as perhaps I might have been after some other weddings (ok, most other weddings) I’ve been to over the years, and the sun was shining I decided to pop in to the lovely Stanford Hall on my way back up north to check out some very, very nice old VWs.
Sadly, I didn’t grab some cash from the machine in the hotel we’d stayed at in Stratford, as it would appear that there were precisely zero cash machines en route to Stanford Hall. The net result being an extra 44 miles on my journey before I came across a cash machine at some services on the A14…….
Part of the driving force behind potentially selling Clarence is that my folks are moving house, and as such I’m going to be losing my garage space for the bug. The Clio is going instead of Clarence of course, although where I’m going to keep them both is still something I’ve yet to figure out. Anyway, the reason I mention that is because about 10 or so years ago a fair bit of my stuff went into their loft and, as I’m guessing the people who are buying their place won’t want my old junk, I spent a couple of hours on Good Friday retrieving some of it.
So here we are in 2014 – and what a difference a year makes! I can’t even remember last January and whilst in some ways that’s quite a scary thought, it’s probably for the best.
12 months on, and the new job is going ok and 10 days before Christmas I moved into a lovely new flat.
There’s plenty of room to have stuff on the walls – indeed the framed version of the letter to Volksworld was the first thing to get put up, and there’s every chance that in the next few weeks the postcards from Wolfsburg will also make it onto the walls.
I’d also forgotten that I’d made the key rack from one of Clarence’s old US number plates!
