The era when you could love a car is over

There are four of us in this relationship: my partner and I, his horse and my truck. His horse is 12, my truck 18. I’m jealous of his horse. He’s beastly about my truck. In our household Julian has only to say ‘nitrogen dioxide’ over dinner and my jaw tightens. ‘Particulants’ saps my appetite. ‘Scrappage scheme’ will drive me from the table.

But, yes, I cannot dispute it: my beloved machine is a filthy polluter. The grey 1999 Vauxhall Brava five-seater ‘king-cab’ pickup illuminates every red light on the Guardian environmentalist George Monbiot’s dashboard. It’s noisy, smelly and smoky, and it’s older-generation diesel. But it’s my faithful friend and has barely done 100,000 miles. The biting rattle of a heavy-duty 20th–century 2.5-litre Isuzu engine is sweeter to my ears than any serenade; and I love that car with an intensity only matched by my first love, a long-deceased 1958 Morris Oxford, and my second, a 1959 Series II Land Rover which passed away, chassis riddled by rust, shortly before I acquired the Vauxhall (second-hand) in the year 2000.

An old car can return affection as no living, breathing creature can. But the era when you could love a car with all its faults, a car could love you back despite all yours, and you could grow old together and fall apart together, and face the graveyard and the scrapyard together, is passing. I peer into a future of lease cars, and rented cars, and city car-share schemes where they all look the same anyway, with only sadness.

Dad bought me the Morris in Africa when I was 16. The Oxfords had ‘-Traveller’ estate-car versions and mine was one of these: two-tone navy blue and grey with 80,000 miles on the clock. In Rhodesia you could drive at 16, and my father wanted me to learn mechanics by the immersive method, reconditioning and re-boring the engine and fitting oversize piston rings.