I inherited many things from my father. My height, for one: I’m 6 ft 3 in and so was he when he was a strapping young lad. My work ethic: my father believed anything was possible if you were willing to work hard enough for it, a sentiment I wholeheartedly endorse. My temper: for both of us the line between calmness and absolute mayhem is a very fine one you don’t really want to make us cross. And my love of food and wine: as well as being a catering manager my dad was an internationally respected sommelier, one of only two non-French judges on the Jurade de Saint Emilion, which classifies Bordeaux wines. Thankfully, though, of all the things I inherited from my father, his taste in cars wasn’t one of them. If anything, the exact opposite is true. If he had a particular car, you can be pretty damn sure I never will. He has what can only be described as an unhealthy obsession with French cars. I, again thankfully, don’t. The only thing he likes more than a French car is a cheap one. If it’s French and cheap, well, nothing makes him happier.
My earliest motoring memories are of my dad’s ‘bargains’. Needless to say, they aren’t happy memories. There was the MkI Escort, the Datsun Sunny, and the white Ford Capri 1.6 Laser with the brown cloth interior, the kind chocolate crumbs used to be drawn to and were then impossible to get off: when you tried scratching chocolate off the seats with your fingernail it just got even more attached and went white. Being a proper Yorkshireman, my dad could never resist a bargain. It didn’t matter how rubbish the car he ended up with was, just as long as he got a good deal on it. I remember, years and years later, him ringing me up full of excitement and telling me that he’d just bought himself a Rolls-Royce. I thought, ‘Bloody hell, this is it. He’s done it. He’s finally come to his senses. He’s worked hard all his life, he’s saved up his money and he’s bought himself a proper Rolls-Royce.’ I was genuinely excited for him and couldn’t wait to see it. When I got to his house, there it was, sitting outside, his Rolls-Royce. And it was white. He’d gone and bought a white Rolls-Royce, like the ones they use for weddings – which was quite fitting really because he’s on his third marriage. His liking for wedding cake and giving all his money away in divorce settlements are two more of his traits I managed to avoid, although my sister wasn’t so lucky.
It’s like he can’t say no, to bargains or weddings. Yes, it’s a hideous car and a horrible colour, and he probably knows it’s a hideous car and he probably can’t stand the colour either, but it’s cheap, so he’ll have it. If he had eight grand to spend on a car and there was a nice one he really liked for eight grand and one that was French and not very nice at all for six grand, he would buy the not-very-nice six grand one, even though he could afford the one he really wanted. If it was a bargain he just wouldn’t be able to turn it down. I got my first car when I was twelve, a little Fiat 126, because someone offered it to him for £40. I’m not complaining. I loved that car, drove it all over the farm and had a great time in it. But I was twelve. I didn’t need a car. All right, I’d had bikes and trikes and I’d driven tractors, and I know he thought it would be a good experience for me to learn to drive in the relative safety of the farm, but the reason he got it was because it had failed its MOT and someone at work was selling it cheap. It was a bargain too good to turn down. Same with the Beetle he bought my mum, and the six Minis he bought my sister. She wrote off five of them but he kept them coming because they were all cheap.
He was always getting a deal from some wheeler-dealer somewhere. Even his cars, which were partly for work and for which he had a budget, he had to try to get a deal on. He would never do what most of my mates do now, which is look at the 40 grand budget their work’s given them for a car and think, ‘If I add 20 grand of my own I can get something really good.’ He would say, ‘I’ve got 40 grand. If I can find a car for 20 grand I’ll have saved 20 grand.’ Which of course is what he did, and which was why all my mates’ dads had amazingly cool cars and I was being dropped off at the school gates in a white Ford Capri 1.6 Laser with brown cloth interior.
It wasn’t just cars my father’s nose for a bargain got in the way of. It also had a laughable effect on his ‘farming’ skills. As you already know, we weren’t farmers, not really. My dad was a catering manager and my mum worked in a shoe shop – what did we know about farming? In his day job, my father was a very successful man; later, as promotions manager, he was responsible for bringing the filming of the the Granada TV version of Brideshead Revisited to Castle Howard and for putting on huge outdoor concerts featuring Bryan Ferry, José Carreras and Luciano Pavarotti. When he first started the place was attracting something like 30 or 40 visitors a day; when he left it was more like 4,000. Part of the deal was that the better you did at Castle Howard, the bigger the place you got, so we had a load of land with our house and it seemed a shame to waste it. As the place was called Lime Kiln Farm – the huge lime kiln was still there and perfect/lethal for a boy with a bike and no sense of danger – it was obvious to my dad that agriculture should be our sideline.
I think I was about five or six when my dad decided that it might be a good idea to try his hand at farming, and it was probably about eleven or twelve years later that my mother finally reached the end of her patience and decided that it wasn’t. In between, I, along with the rest of my family, was subjected to a long list of ridiculous schemes. When we started breeding pigs, my dad spotted a ‘bargain’ boar in Exchange & Mart which was a deal too good to pass up, just like his cars. Now, anyone who knows anything about pig farming will tell you that in order to have good piglets you need good sows and, most importantly, a good boar. They’ll also tell you that though boars can be very expensive, if you get a good one, it’ll be an investment. My father had found a boar for sale for £50 – suspiciously cheap for most, but he thought it was his lucky day. He hitched the trailer up to the car, drove the 60 miles to Northampton, paid the old dear who was selling it, came back, put it in the pen next to the females – who were ready, able and by this time well up for it – opened the gate and waited. And waited. And waited. You’ve never seen a male so disinterested in the female of the species in your whole life. So my dad called the vet, who came over, took one look and asked, ‘Where did you buy it from? It’s not the one from Northampton is it?’ Turned out this boar was famous as the only gay boar in the village. My dad went nuts. We were eating bacon for months after that.
My dad was just a useless farmer, there was no two ways about it. At one point we had 50 chickens, 25 cockerels and 25 hens, and the hens weren’t laying. My dad, in his infinite wisdom, decided that the cockerels must be the problem, interfering with the hens and stopping them laying. So he went out one afternoon and just killed the cockerels. All of them. A week later, still nothing, no eggs, so he got the vet out again and it turned out that he’d got rid of the hens. We had 25 cockerels running around and my dad was waiting for them to lay.
In the end it was once again his complete inability to turn away a good deal that proved to be the last straw (pun intended). One day, for no reason other than it was really, really cheap, he decided to buy all the hay from the field next door. At the time we had pigs and cattle so we needed hay for feed and bedding. But we only had 16 pigs and a dozen cows and the field next door was bloody massive. A Texan ranch wouldn’t have been able to use all the hay that came from it. When he had it delivered it made a 50 foot by 50 foot stack. As you drove up to the hill, you couldn’t see the house any more, just this giant haystack. My mother was furious. It didn’t help matters when she discovered that my dad had left all the windows open at the back of the house so there was hay and dust everywhere inside. That was it. My mother decided enough was enough, we were getting out of farming for good.
Meanwhile his fixation with cheap cars continued, and if it wasn’t a bargain it had to be French. Peugeots, Citroëns, hideous, hideous things I had to go to school in which left me mentally scarred for life. After years of this cruel and unusual punishment I vowed never to buy a French car, and I never will. He had a Peugeot 306, a 406, a 505, Citroën Xantias, an XM and a BX, the one with the hydraulic suspension that made the back go up and down although no one ever really knew why. They were dreadful cars that looked like they’d been specifically designed to be rubbish. I can only think that his obsession with French cars was because he loved French food and wine. I listened to him on the subject of the food and the wine, but not the cars. They were crap. And I mean really crap.
My dad’s apparent phobia of anything even approaching a proper driver’s