Confessions of an anorak

Am I an anorak? An uncomfortable thought, like discovering that some feature you had never noticed in yourself — your Adam’s apple, perhaps, or your ears — is what people always remember about you. I wore an anorak, long ago during my teenage motor-scooter period. That comprised Lambretta 1, which cost £8, was a slow starter and died of engine seizure, but not before it had caused my motorcycle test to be abandoned by an impatient examiner known locally as Failer Fowler. (That in turn provoked me to remove my L-plates and ride illegally for the rest of my brief two-wheeled career.) Lambretta 2 cost £3 and ran faultlessly until I sold it for £8. The anorak ended up as the thing I used to lie on during the many hours spent beneath my first car.

But now the term is most often used to refer to collectors of anything not thought to be high art. Contentedly absorbed men who stand on station platforms noting train numbers are thus assumed to be sad anoraks. That I should be one, or at least an incipient one, did not occur to me until I was well into Giles Chapman’s new book, Car Badges (Merrell, £12.95). This not only makes sitting in traffic jams even more interesting (sic), but it’s also social and industrial history. It was particularly pleasing to see mention of Eleanor Thornton, who posed nude as the model for Rolls-Royce’s famous Spirit of Ecstasy. She was secretary and mistress to Lord Montague, had a secret child by him and perished with her child when the ship on which they were all three sailing to Egypt was torpedoed in 1916. There’s a place for her in the great film yet to be made about the early days of motorism.