Regrets, I’ve had a few…

Most of my regrets are of sins of omission rather than commission; what I didn’t do rather than what I did. (I’m thinking here of acquisitive opportunities rather than moral actions, where the balance of regret should probably be more even and the total certainly greater.) Recently, I’ve been thinking particularly of an XK150 Jaguar.

It was a Norfolk car, a fixed-head coupé, in the days when you could pick them up for £2,500. It went faster than I could drive, seemed solid, had reasonable chrome, looked good in British Racing Green and had been well maintained by a retired gentleman whose son was selling it for him. Others were interested, I was due to travel abroad and that Sunday was my one chance to go to Norfolk and close the deal. I’d arranged an early lunch with a friend near London’s Borough market and intended to get the train to Norwich later. I never got it, of course; it was one of those lunches, one of those conversations that filled the day. Though I still regret the Jaguar, I cannot regret the friendship that occasioned its loss; but I do wish I could remember what we talked about.

What troubles me now is that I may have just repeated the mistake. It’s another fixed head XK150, Cotswold Blue this time, and the asking price is £16,100 — cheap for an XK150. They’re generally in the mid-£20,000s now, though Barons sold one last year for £49,000, and they’re appreciating after years of trailing the XK120s and XK140s. This one is a 1959 car that had four owners in ten years of active life, until suffering a rear-end shunt in 1969 at 61,364 miles (verified by a post-repair AA report).