Youthful exuberance
As a mere slip of a toddler, I was utterly entanced by cars - at about two years old I could distinguish between a Morris Marina and a Vauxhall Viva simply by the shape of their door handles.

Now, we lived, being poor, in a block of flats in a run-down area of Leeds. The smell of cod-liver-oil suspended in malt still haunts my synapses and I still feel an involuntary shudder when I walk over trodden-down, smushed, cat-kins.

But next door to us, nigh on thirty years ago, there lived a ray of light - a young woman of some independent means - with blonde hair and, more importantly to this petrol-headed whippersnapper, a Triumph TR7.

I asked her to marry me. I thought - at that ever-so-undercooked age, where I couldn't sleep in my own room due to the Magic Roundabout light-shade, and the pecking geese under my bed - that we could be happy together.

I was delighted to hear that she said 'Yes' and advised me that she'd wait for me. That I should see her again when I had become a man, and that we would be together, me, the TR7 and her.

If we fast-forward a number of years, (I must have been about twenty-two or twenty-three), and my family had been involved in a long-running feud with another - and imagine my surprise when the mistress of the head of that be-nighted line turned out to be the self-same woman I had proposed to twenty or so years ago.

She approached me and reminded me of our pact.

That in itself would have been embarrassing enough, if it wasn't for the fact she'd turned into a wizened old scrotum. And she hadn't kept hold of the TR7 - she'd got some poncey, hair-dresser-esque Merc coupe instead.

I thanked the good lord above that I was able to use the fact she was grinding her bony hips upon my mortal enemy's tiny, diseased cockle as an excuse for reneging on my (everso kind) twenty-year-old offer.
(Chickenwire social lubricator extraordinaire, Sat 30 Sep 2006, 7:19, Reply)