2. The Rover 213S (1986)

Description

A few months later, I was offered a job with a famous brewery company (now defunct) with an extensive national pub network. At that time, I was a computer programmer familiar with an unusual operating system that the brewery used to manage its stock control system across its managed house estate. A managed house is a pub owned by the brewery, the publican is called a house manager and is salaried with additional incentives to over achieve on liquid sales and on food. Often the food side of the business is entirely their own.

The business analyst vacancy at the brewery resulted from a previous incumbent getting promoted although, as I later surmised, it appeared that he was promoted out of the way because he had apparently achieved nothing in terms of maintaining and bug fixing the old stocktaking system. This stocktaking system was in a state of near collapse and the brewery chiefs had lost all confidence in the stock control reports generated by the system.

Against this background, the brewery placed an advert in one of the popular computing weekly magazines which were read assiduously cover to cover by everyone in the industry. There were three exceptionally attractive aspects of the role described in the advertisement. Firstly, it required skills that only a few people in the UK possessed. Secondly, it was a managerial person with a good salary and good prospects and, most importantly, it offered a company car!

This was a time when computer programmers and analysts were well regarded, jobs were plentiful but experienced resources were scarce. Consequently, salary inflation was rife leading to people changing jobs frequently behaving little better than sniffers at a county fair. In order to compete in this market, companies’ benefits packages increased dramatically. Of course, it wasn’t very long before the human resources departments in these companies realised that these bright young things weren’t interested in life assurance or pension benefits. These bright young things were egotistical, upwardly mobile with expectations of rising salaries year on year – what they wanted were company cars to show off their status amongst friends and family. And I was no exception. People such as myself and my wife were horribly, but accurately termed ‘dinkys’: double income, no kids yet!

Initially, I had a tinge of guilt about the whole interviewing and selecting process. Initially, I had known nothing about the job, it had been a colleague who’d pointed it out to me and therefore, it was felt later that I’d ‘done the dirty’ by sneaking off to the interview without telling anyone else and snatching the job from under my colleague’s nose.

The fact that this colleague was a right knob-end and was barely employable anywhere didn’t seem to count!

Perversely, when I got the job I felt uncomfortable with the notion that someone would give me a company car – lunacy. However, all the discomfort quickly passed once I was sat at home on garden leave reviewing the choices of company cars available to me at the new company.

You have to remember that I was only 25 at this point. I’d only been married for a year and we were shackled by a 100% mortgage. We’d only recently got on top of the mortgage and we’d begun to enjoy some of our disposable income. This opportunity seemed to be a significant step up the ladder. I was to be a level one manager with a company car.

Fuck!

It was no concern that the brewery’s head office involved a round trip of 140 miles a day home and back. It was of no concern that journey involved a trip up the M3, around the M25 and up the M1 to Luton: three of the busiest motorways in Europe. It was worse still because the M25 hadn’t been completed at this time. A journey to Luton involved detours around Staines, Denham and Watford to keep on the nascent M25 and follow it round to the M1. Remarkably, even with these deviations, it still only took an hour to go the seventy miles from Basingstoke to Luton.

Those were the days!

But none of this mattered, only the choice of the car mattered. The choice may seem limited by today’s standards and the cars unexciting, but none of that occurred to me then because in my arrogant mind’s eye they were state of the art junior manager’s cars. I was naïve and a company car was a company car!

The choice was either an Astra 1.6L, a Vauxhall Cavalier 1.3L, a Montego 1.6L or a Rover 213S. These were all entry level vehicles, no alloy wheels, no electric anything and no metallic paint. Air-conditioning was still something only available in a Rolls Royce.

The Astra was an ugly car, it looked just like an aardvark. The only thing it had going for it was the stereo had an FM receiver which could be tuned exactly to the digital frequency required. This didn’t mean that it would lock into the radio station – only that it would lock into the frequency you had selected. We were still ten years away from RDS systems and twenty-five years away from DAB. No, this meant that the frequency would hold until you moved outside the range of that particular transmitter and then you’ve have to find the station again. It may not sound like it now, but at the time, using a digital frequency to find the station rather than turning a temperamental analogue wheel was a revolutionary step forward. Some people might have selected the Astra based on this single attribute!

We read car magazines cover to cover in those days and were only too aware that the Cavalier was due a face-lift in six months time and therefore would be as hackneyed as a ‘chewed and spat out smartie’ by then. The Montego was a large car with a relatively big engine at least judged by the choices available, however, it also shared many characteristics associated with the quintessential essence of British craftsmanship in the seventies and early eighties – it was flimsy, it was shoddy and it was made from cheap materials.

The Rover, on the other hand, was stylish. True, it was smaller than the Cavalier and the Montego, but what it lacked in size it made up for in sheer panache. It was well made, at least compared to the awful Montego, and something of the much older country doctor’s Rover P4 80 had rubbed off on it. I ordered a red one.

The interior was festooned with Rover insignia which I eventually figured out was a bow of a Viking long-ship. The cloth upholstery was like velour and it smelt imperial. Aside from these features it was actually a little Spartan inside. The heater was manual with archaic slide controls that looked the same as the ones in my grandfather’s old A35 van. It had a radio-cassette. The cassette offered stereo reproduction but the radio offered only long wave and medium wave and that meant mostly mono white noise. The radio stations had to be tuned manually using a clumsy wheel that never quite seemed to be able to locate the strongest signal. As you careered up and down the motorways, you were forever having to spin the dial searching for the maximum signal strength available from your new location.

There were no electrics in those days either, but the mirrors could be adjusted from the inside manually – as, it has to be said, could the windows. There was no coordination of design in the cabin either – it was very much like my father’s hi-fi separates at home.

My father’s hi-fi system was a visual irritation to my mother. The vast brushed steel facial of the Yamaha amplifier contrasted unfavourably with the teal colour of the tiny Quad FM tuner perched on top of it. The interior of the Rover developed a similar irritation with me. No amount of Rover badges scattered throughout the cabin would remove the feeling that the absolute minimum amount of effort had gone into the cabin design. In many ways the interior, the dashboard and controls placement, the design and feel had more in common with much older models and I suppose that this was because there was a direct heritage from my grandfather’s A35 van to the present models. This was particularly evident in the design of the heater and some of the switches, as already mentioned. Incidentally, I believe that the heater was an optional extra in my grandfather’s A35 van, so perhaps I shouldn’t grumble too much about the Rover!

The Rover had a five speed gearbox and this was a real novelty. A feature that just had to be exploited as often as possible even at ridiculously low speeds teetering on the brink of stalling as it gasped for more power with cyclists and the odd power walker overtaking me. I seem to remember that it still had a choke that glowed orange when pulled out, nice touch that! My kids today don’t know what a choke is and they get worried when their cars seem to over-rev and emit more exhaust fumes than usual on cold winter mornings!

The advanced features of this car then, just to ensure that I don’t do it any injustice, were an heated rear windscreen, internal adjustable wing mirrors, a five speed gearbox, an intermittent wash-wipe and, last but not least, a manually retractable exterior radio antennae that disappeared down the driver’s side front windscreen stanchion.

Cool.

I remember being so overawed by having a brand new company car that I really can’t recall how it drove. I think that it was nippy and precise, I don’t think the steering was heavy even though there was no power assisted steering or maybe there was. Certainly, it was in the Rover that I received my first ever speeding ticket for recording 92.3 mph on the M25. This was quite a feat, although it was downhill from the M40 junction under the viaduct towards Rickmansworth. I was naïve, worried when the police car signalled for me to park up on the hard shoulder. I got out of the Rover and walked along to the police car. The burly policemen who had had a bad day was not amused, so when he pointed to a digital readout that stated ’92.3’ and asked ‘what do you think that is, son?’ the thought of making light of the whole thing and replying ‘is it really that hot, officer?’ was quickly pushed from my mind.

“Is it the speed you clocked me at?” I replied, rather pathetically.

He nodded grimly and proceeded to take down my details and started to read from a card.

“You do not have to say anything, but if you do, it may be taken down…”

“What, are you arresting me, officer?” I stammered.

He gave me a look then that suggested that I should be at home with my mum as I wasn’t at all ready for the real world and I guess he took pity because his whole demeanour changed.

“No son, it’s just a caution. It’ll be used if you want your day in court to protest your innocence. If not, then it’s 3 points and a £50 fine.”

I knew what happened to idiots who went to court when they were caught red-handed – as often as not they got bigger fines and sometimes more points for wasting the Court’s time. I had to have a driving licence to do my job and that driving licence had to have the minimum number of points possible on it because I needed space for the other points I would undoubtedly get especially when you consider the miles I was doing. In my profession, getting caught speeding and the resultant speeding tickets were an occupational hazard. So I accepted my punishment and went on my way, a little wiser following my chastisement.

You can’t escape your genes and my father’s legacy to me was a love of music (mostly classical, but everything else too). When I was a teenager, he would have liked me to continue with my violin lessons rather than give them up to take up the guitar, acoustic at first and then, against his will, electric. My father judged people by the music they listened to. When we lived in York he steadfastly refused to trust our ‘shady’ next door neighbour for one reason alone – he listened almost exclusively to Mahler!

‘There’s something wrong with him! All those dreary long passages of noise going nowhere – it’s affected his brain!’

I never lost my love for classical music, but this was now augmented by an equal love for punk, new wave, blues and anything else I could get my hands on. It also meant that as soon as I was able to I bought myself an entry level hi-fi on hire purchase – the Thatcher Years. This was a crime my mother has not yet forgiven me for – the hire purchase not the hi-fi. In those days, entry level meant a Dual turntable, an Ortofon cartridge (if you could afford it), a NAD 3020 amplifier and, in my case, a pair of Kef Celeste III speakers on their own stands like a pair of malevolent robotic extras from Doctor Who. As it was hire purchase, and therefore not real money, I’d added a luxury – a Nakamichi BX1 tape deck with Dolby B and C. This was extravagant and, to gild the lily, a few years later I bought a Yamaha CD3, one of the first commercial CD players. It alone was over £400. This marks me as my father’s son, because I remember him sneaking out of the house with me when I was no more than ten years old and going to Guildford to buy the aforementioned Quad stereo FM tuner as the final piece of his audiophile dream system. It cost the equivalent of a fortnight’s take home for him. To this day, I think the only reason my mother didn’t divorce him on the spot, after giving him a severe beating, was the fact that I was standing beside him grinning inanely at the reckless audacity of his purchase! To make matters worse, my father was in search of musical reproductive excellence and cared not for the ascetic value of what his collection of separates looked like nor the confusion of wires issuing from the various different sizes and colours of the boxes. To my credit, I at least was thinking of my wife when I purchased the items trying to match the sizes and the colours which was a lot easier than it had been in my father’s heyday. He would take this to extremes in search of perfection. He once converted two concrete drain pipes into speakers and in order to create the near perfect horizontal solid and damped surface for the hi-fi turntable and arm, he created a hollow shelf filled with sand. This weighed over ten stones and he had to reinforce the walls so that it didn’t bring the chimney breast down.

Anyway, the point of all this recollection was to say that with this state of the art equipment, I was able to make cassettes on TDK Super Avalon tapes to a pretty high quality. I would stack these into the glove-box and pull out different ones as the mood took me. I loved making tapes up whether they contained whole albums to force me to absorb difficult pieces or whether they were collections of tracks to create ‘mood’ tapes. These collections contain everything and anything – rousing, uplifting music to set the tone before critical meetings or perhaps a sing-along mix compilation tape for the long drives home.

Whilst the tape technology of the day was able to capture the dynamic range of frequencies to a very high degree of fidelity, for music scored as fortissimo or pianoforte the in-car stereos of the day were not able to do them justice. This was especially true for classical music. Music listened to in the car was therefore inclined towards pop and rock music which tended not to suffer greatly when the frequencies were severely truncated by the inadequacies of the playback equipment. This situation remained true for years, although modern in-car equipment is now much better and most cars have tweeters and sub-woofers et cetera to allow for a more expansive sound. The main problem today is in the software not the playback hardware. Mini-disc and tapes were fine, but the mp3 format was never intended for dynamic music reproduction and many people, myself included, hark back to vinyl and analogue reproduction even allowing for all the scratches and jumps.

I’m one of those people who when asked to go to the shops for three essential items of food, I find that, when I get there, I can’t for the life of me remember what the third thing was. Yet, if you play any particular piece of music I can often remember a specific moment in time when some poignant events collided to hard code my memory, I can remember it and I can remember everything else too. I can often remember what I was eating, smelling, tasting, the weather, what I did next – curious minutiae of that very specific moment. Strangely, it often works the other way as well, if I see a picture or perhaps taste something I haven’t tasted for a long time then I can often recall a piece of music associated with it, sometimes from thirty years ago.

Classical music became the music that was listened to at home on the hi-fi system and rock music was for the car. It wasn’t only classical music that had quiet, sensitive parts that needed smooth roads and the volume turned up just to appreciate the subtleties of the piece. I’m thinking of songs like Joe Walsh’s ‘Pretty Maids All In A Row’. Unfortunately, this beautiful song is often overlooked in favour of other tracks on ‘Hotel California’ such as the guitar riff inspired nonsense of ‘Life In The Fast Lane’.

I digress.

The Rover only had two speakers, but the sound quality of the tape was a great leap forward from the Renault. This was the time of the U2’s Unforgettable Fire album and the haunting, mystical ‘A Sort of Homecoming’ that opened the album. A track that was unusual in that it led you into the middle of what seemed like a dream sequence rather than telling a story from start to finish. This was not the U2 we thought we knew from earlier albums, but an altogether more circumspect U2 with a different approach to crafting songs that must have had a lot to do with the producers Brian Eno and Daniel Lanois being on hand to give it an ethereal quality that stands the test of time. My wife’s tape of No Jacket Required was chucked over the shoulder and U2 was in the tape machine.

I wasn’t an only child, but I had two younger sisters who shared a room and were close, so sometimes it felt like I was. From an early age I’d developed ways of learning to be at ease with my own company. The epitome of this manifestation was sitting alone in the car as a cocoon and spending hours a day on the road with the car as my second skin – so it was never a problem for me to work a long way from where I lived. The car and I would have good days and bad days. Sometimes I’d know instinctively that something wasn’t quite right, the clutch cable was about to fail, the tyre pressures were incorrect or the tracking was pulling to the right. Sometimes I wasn’t quite right: not in harmony with my machine, uncomfortable in my extended skin. This is an awful feeling, it can start with something simple like wearing new shoes which slip off the accelerator and it can end with the car on the back of a tow-truck. Some days you can’t get the heater set at the correct level, there’s too much condensation on the windscreen et cetera, these minor inadequacies can escalate to inhibit a smooth driving style, as if the car knows you are not yourself and is disturbed and unruly. This can manifest itself in odd ways such as conspiring to spoil the optimal gear change, being in the wrong gear when you want to accelerate onto a busy roundabout, hesitating when you should be ‘going for it’ or risking the M25 when you should have gone off the M40 and taken an extra 10 minutes to get home rather than being stuck interminably close to Heathrow for hour upon hour.

There were no considerations for the environment in those days, not that the Rover was a gas guzzler by any definition, but even the government had not clocked on to what their car tax regime was encouraging. Tax on fuel cards was relatively low, especially if you did more than 18000 miles a year. So people did over 18000 business miles a year, didn’t they?

So much for the environment.

The taxable benefit for the pleasure of accepting a company car was also relatively low. It was a very easy calculation to work out the positive economic value of having a company car over running your own and, besides, in those days the status of the company car far outweighed any cost considerations. This situation would not begin to change in the UK for a decade or more. Once you had one, then you had one and the only thing that concerned someone ambitious and immodest was how to climb the ladder for more money, a better grade and the outward veneer of these achievements was the company car upgrade. It was a time for flaunting your material possessions. A repugnant, indulgent time, but I was part of it, repelled and compelled simultaneously by a driving momentum to over achieve. It was a time of ‘loads of money’, ‘go faster stripes’ and useless and meaningless spoilers. In a small way I was part of a sickeningly conceited element of society driving themselves towards an unsustainable credit-strangled future, but that’s another story and for another time. The car upgrade was what everyone wanted before anything else, to laud it over your mates and work colleagues, jealous siblings and to demonstrate to your mum and dad that you could make it on your own – and in what style!

Consequently, I drove around England like a lunatic for the brewing company, re-coding badly maintained stock control systems one by one (there were ten of them, one in each region) and then around again as they became corrupted which was a common problem with poor computer coding, inadequately trained operators and archaic PDP-11 machines with their carburettor-like removable disk packs. For those interested in such things, the stocktaking system was written in MicroCobol II operating on BOS (Business Operating System), the first ever transportable programming language – years before Unix.

I only really had one problem with the little red Rover and that was in the biggest village in England: Sheffield.

I was doing a midweek circuit of the company’s northern breweries and loading up a new release of the stock control software. This had been designed specifically by me to reduce the functionality of the software by stripping out thousands of lines of redundant code. The chap who had had my job before me was a witless idiot who clearly knew nothing about the system he was supposed to be supporting. No-one had touched the source code since it had been delivered to the company years before. It is a wonder to me how little management care about what one actually does at work, all they care about is how much you can bullshit and the reflected glory this gives them and this was true of the previous incumbent. It is true of many people I would meet along the way too. Needless to say, he was still promoted! I mustn’t grumble because without his promotion I wouldn’t have got the job in the first place and without his incompetence I wouldn’t have been able to make an instant positive impact doing only what I was paid to do. He, who had been recently promoted, had moved into a new area of business the company preferred to call, euphemistically, ‘Amusements With Prizes’ or ‘AWP’ for short. To me this was the ultimate irony: a bullshit name for a bullshit person. To you and me, he would be managing the introduction of slot machines and one-arm bandits into managed houses and making sure that they got cycled around frequently so that the punters wouldn’t get bored (or work out how to win, or rather, work out that they couldn’t win!). This business should have been called: “GMDTTMFTG” or Gambling-Machines-Designed-To-Take-Money-From-The-Gullible.

Not very catchy though, is it?

Since no-one but I understood the stock control system code, there was no-one to question what I’d done and that was a brilliantly conceived piece of logic even if I say so myself. The systems were old, even by the standards of the day. Over the years with high staff turnover the responsibility for the operations of the systems had migrated to dependable older members of staff who were unlikely to leave their jobs because they would soon be enjoying generous pension terms from the company schemes.

Can you remember those?

These mature operators kept things simple, easy for themselves and easy for the company. A great deal of the functionality available to them they ignored or just didn’t understand because the handover process from previous operators was not up to scratch and as each successive handover took place so the procedure focused slowly, but surely towards the stock control kernel. Automated updates in the system which depended on certain table maintenance routines being followed crashed and corrupted certain files. Hence, the company needed someone like me to drive around re-building the software. As many of the corrupted files were superfluous to the main stocktaking system, and I could issue standard tables from the central office, there was no need for each system to hold so much unused code for the unused functionality. I re-coded, presented a simpler user interface, re-trained the operators on essential table maintenance with an agreed update timetable and promised them that systems would not crash so often. Fortunately for me this proved to be the case – the systems didn’t crash at all. Morale amongst the operators rose as their confidence in the systems increased, senior management started trusting the outputs and the operators’ stress levels reduced dramatically with a corresponding reduction in sickness.

So what’s all this got to do with the Rover 213S, you ask?

Over the previous couple of days, I’d finished the upgrades to Salford, to Blackburn, to Peterlee, County Durham and to Leeds and I was returning to Sheffield on the evening of the third day away. I would do the Sheffield’s Exchange Brewery’s upgrade the following morning. I used Sheffield as a base frequently, it was the most southerly of the northern breweries and therefore less distance to drive home, but there was another more compelling reason than that. I’d studied at the University of Sheffield and whilst there, amongst other things, I’d had developed an affinity to Sheffield Wednesday Football Club – Wednesday ‘til I die. Sometimes I was able to attend an evening game on my own or with some of the guys at the Exchange Brewery. If there was a match on I’d stay in the city, if not I’d stay in the Peak District.

I was pleased with myself, the upgrades had been well received and I was looking forward to some well earned beers and a good nosh-up at one of the company’s hotels located just outside Sheffield in the picturesque Peak District village of Hathersage – there was no football that night! It wasn’t that far from Edale and Kinder Scout where some fifty years before Ewan McCall and other ideologically recalcitrant and far-sighted individuals had protested for the rights of all persons to ramble across the hills unmolested by despotic landowners and their fawning gamekeepers. The irony was not lost on me, I had the right to ramble, but I chose to drive. I enjoyed the privilege bestowed by those recalcitrant ideologues, but instead sought to perpetuate a growing materialism regardless of how vacuous and shallow that now seems.

Maybe the little red Rover believed I wasn’t paying enough attention to her, complacent with my hubris. I came off the M1 at junction 33, but as I pulled away from the traffic lights at the junction to head off down the Parkway into Sheffield I noticed a distinct lack of power from the little engine…more than normal. I couldn’t go more than 40 mph. The handbrake wasn’t on and I seemed to have enough fuel so something else was definitely not performing to specification. There was another problem too. Other driver’s were gesticulating at me as they passed by and none to pleasantly either. I realised that there was smoke coming from the back of the car and as I struggled into Sheffield it gradually turned from wispy white puffs to gnarling plumes of black smoke the colour of the coal that fuelled the huge rolling mills in Tinsley.

There was a serious problem.

I stopped at a petrol station and gave the car the once over. I could not detect anything out of the ordinary, but then again I know diddly-squat about car maintenance. I decided to see if I could make it to a Rover garage in West Street in the centre of Sheffield. I was confident the car would make it the 3 miles or so, but could I ignore the embarrassment of the smoke she was generating and could I avoid the attentions of South Yorkshire’s finest? Every person I passed looked in astonishment at the sight of the smoke billowing behind me, that is until it engulfed them and they disappeared from view bent double gagging in a coughing fit.

I turned off the engine as soon as I could and glided without power to a halt outside the garage. I’d left the smoke plume a hundred yards behind me. My facial expression declared complete ignorance of its source as I joined passers-by wondering who the idiot was who was polluting their city. Sheffield had recently won the ‘cleanest city in Europe’ award, at least that’s what everyone kept telling me!

The garage was shut.

It was a quarter to six and there were no mobile phones in 1986. The car pool manager back at HQ in Luton would have gone home by now. I was in a tidy-pickle. Eventually, I decided to do the most stupid thing of all – drive the 10 miles to the Peak District village of Hathersage. My logic might have gone something like this. I couldn’t leave the car at a garage because the garage was shut and I wouldn’t have been able to get a hire-car replacement because I had no contact details available. This would normally have been done for you from HQ, but HQ was closed. I had got the car this far, the city centre was coming out of the rush hour and the Peak District countryside was quieter than the city. Perhaps it would be possible to get away with driving the 10 miles to Hathersage without being stopped by the police. All it would take to do this was balls; the brazen intrepid daring required to ignore the irritated and disapproving citizenry critical of my atrocious behaviour. The decision was made and I did a U-turn in West Street to point the car towards the Peak District. This manoeuvre must have looked like an army training exercise where they lay down smoke bombs to hide their intentions and then coming out of the smoke-screen was a ponderous tank – no wait a minute, it’s a bright red Rover driven by a red-faced idiot who should have known better!

So much for daring-do.

I got the car to Hathersage – it was the longest drive of my life. I parked it up in the hotel car park, grabbed my overnight bag and ran to reception through the smoke hoping that no-one had seen me.

The following day I got a tow-truck to get us back to the city centre garage and was fortunate that by the time I’d concluded the software upgrade at the Sheffield office the car had been repaired. The exhaust manifold had sheared off.

Whatever that means.

There was much shaking of heads and disbelief that I’d driven it from the M1 junction, let alone to Hathersage in ‘nuclear free’ Derbyshire as it read on the county border sign. Nuclear free perhaps, but at that moment, far from smog free!

As I said earlier, I was spending most of my working week on our beloved motorway network driving around the brewery’s 10 regional centres putting right their badly maintained stock control software. This took me as far north as Peterlee and as far west as Llantrisant and just about everywhere else in between. The Rover was a comfy motorway cruiser if a little staid and I was very disappointed after a few month’s ownership to find that it had been dubbed in the motoring press ‘the pensioners’ friend’. Later this was picked up by the BBC who chose the vehicle as the carriage of Hyacinth Bucket from ‘Keeping up appearances’. In truth, I supposed that I was a little snobby in choosing the Rover over the other cars. The obvious choice was the Montego, it was a relatively new model, it was large and had a 1.6 litre engine. It should have been quicker than the Rover. The Montego, though, looked jerry-built as if in a few weeks it would have fallen to bits. The Rover never felt like that at all. It felt solid, reliable and just a little bit classy: a cut above the ordinary. Rover and Honda had recently started to collaborate in the development of their vehicles and their engines. The first product of this marriage was the Triumph Acclaim which was reasonably successful, the second was the Rover 200 series. Essentially, the Rover 200 was a re-worked Honda Ballade. Although built in the UK with all the Rover branding, importantly, it had the Honda engine. This resulted in the widely held impression in the market that the Rover 200 represented a quality car offered to the discerning motorist – and that’s how I got suckered.

The Rover was precise in terms of its steering. I say this because it saved my life on one particular occasion. I was careering along the M25 approaching the M4 interchange from the West. I must have been fiddling with the radio or something because as I went over the brow of the interchange over the M4, I suddenly looked up to see that all lanes in front of me were stationary and I was travelling at probably seventy miles per hour towards them.

Shit!

Somehow, in someway that will probably never ever be repeated, I was able to steer, whilst braking heavily, between the cars in the middle lane and the outside lane and that was in the days before anti-lock braking was standard. I looked from side to side at the incredulous drivers, their mouths drooping with a mixture of shock and awe. Not a mirror snapped or a door scraped. As the traffic began to move again, I sheepishly swung in behind a black Mercedes in the middle lane and was a model driver all the way home shaking like a leaf.

In less than one year I had racked up 30000 miles and that meant it was change of car time.

In my view, I have been born with a terrible affliction: I’ve always felt that companies have valued my services at one grade lower than I was actually worth and indeed was performing at. So at car change time I was hankering for a Manager B grade from my entry level Manager C grade. A B grade would have meant access to an MkIV Ford Escort XR3i or an MkII Astra GTE and other such interesting and sporty, out-of-reach, machines.

Whenever my Rover was in for a service I’d always phone car fleet well in advance to ensure that I’d get an interesting car from the pool and this was encouraged as it saved the company money by avoiding hire car costs. So I’d go from a docile 1300 engine to a fuel injected 1800 (in the XR3i, for example) which I’d throw around like the archetypal boy-racer finding excuses to visit everyone I could think of. Then I’d try to string this out for a whole week claiming that the Rover servicing team had to order a part or whatever. The deflated feeling of accepting one’s lowly status in the company was firmly re-established as soon as the ‘flash motor’ was exchanged again for the little dependable Rover.

See what I did there? In no time at all, I’d gone from someone who was elated to have a company car, any company car, to being a rat-race snob aching for bigger and more powerful cars with more and more gismos because this signified, to me at least, success and progress. I doubt that Charles Darwin would recognise that as progress though, he would probably say that understanding now what an idiot I was to get on that mental bandwagon back then represents progress of sorts…only thirty years too late!

By the time it came to make my second car choice at the brewery, the Vauxhall Cavalier had had its much heralded face-lift and I chose it.

 

SUMMARY (7/10): The Rover 213S was my first company car and so it is difficult to judge it in the cold light of day because it has such significance to me, but I’ll try. Essentially, it was pretty basic even for the standards of the day, but in its way it tried to reflect some of the standards of the Rovers of old, the seats were plush and everywhere you looked there was Viking long-ship bow insignia to remind you what you were driving. However, the dashboard felt like it was put together from odds and sods of other models and the radio was poor. On the whole it was a case of style over substance, although it was perky and quite speedy in its own way.

From the confidence and independence obtained from the Renault, I could now add that I had become adventurous to boot! I’d driven the length and breadth of Britain, well England anyway and discovered a love for old Blighty. Whether it was the cold, windswept heights of Blackburn or the trusty otherworldly beauty of the Wye Valley, from the Chepstow to Monmouth, or the Snake Pass from Glossop to Sheffield, I had begun to get to know the old place a little better from the steamed up windows of the Rover.

Funnily enough, I’d like to drive one again just to remind myself what it was like all those years ago, but I doubt somehow that there are any left, perhaps you know better?

 

Next time, it’s the Cavalier 1.3L (1987).