They say you can never really go back, even when your memories are coloured by your circumstances. Genuinely revisiting your past is impossible, or at least it is a reflection warped by experience.
For me in the car world, my past is the air-cooled VW scene. Whilst I’ve been around older cars since I was a child, the first ‘scene’ I was really involved with was centred around Volkswagens.
I had a 1972 VW bay window van, back when such things could be picked up for a little over a £1,000. For someone without a garage or much mechanical inclination it was probably a poor choice, but I got to feel part of a scene.
At the same time, my wife had a 1966 Beetle on twin Webers as her daily driver. We were living the dream. By which I mean we had two totally inappropriate cars we used daily, that were a total nightmare when they went wrong. Which they did with incredible regularity.
That is the reason the VW love affair ended. Our local garage saw us coming and we were naive enough not to realise how badly we were regularly being ripped off. This is my memory of air-cooled Volkswagen ownership, the lens through which I still view it.