Driving Ambitions

- Dom Joly

My car is dying. I think it might be time to move on but I am overly attached to my Land Rover Discovery - a rare success story in my history of car purchases.

I love cars but am by no means a petrol-head. My very first was a convertible. Sadly it was a Citroen Diane which, although rather wonderful, was not the lady magnet I longed for in my early twenties.

In the early Nineties I bought a White Golf GTi convertible from a man behind Fullers Brewery for cash. I drove it out to Prague where I had just got a posting as a diplomat. When I got there, six months after the Velvet Revolution, I discovered that I was the owner of the only convertible in the country. This gave me quite a lot of kudos points. Sadly, I received a letter from England informing me that my car had been on hire purchase and was considered stolen. I now had the only dodgy convertible in Czechoslovakia. It came to a sad end in Poland after I slid on some ice and hit a tree near Krakow. The tree survived. The car didn’t.