The ’64 that refused to die! My first car – I’ve owned it for over 20 years now and STILL haven’t got to grips with it. One of 49 60s Beetles in the UK, only 6 ’64s sayeth How Many Left. There is no getting away from the fact that, compared to my Mercedes… it’s a right Shed! We’ve had some fun times over the years.

I’d wanted a Beetle from a very young age – used to play with a little metallic purple Beetle on my Nan’s living room floor when I was a kid. I started reading Street Machines whenever there was a Beetle on the cover, and then Volksworld every month for years. I bought the ’64 in 1998, having spent months looking for an early small-window Beetle. Finally found one in what used to be 6 pages of classified ads in Volksworld, and off I went… on the train with £2000 in cash in my pocket! Travelling down to Croydon from University in Lancaster.

I’d never driven a Beetle before, and for those of you who have… it’s quite an experience, isn’t it! Anyway, I bought the car and drove it back to Lancaster – an adventure in itself. I then used the car as a daily driver for a couple of years, enjoying its ‘character’ – a word fans of a Beetle use as code for it being a bit of a heap. I had it converted from 6v to 12v so I could enjoy luxuries such as headlights and windscreen wipers. I had it lowered, which made it handle less like a lorry but more like a panicking rollerskate. It remains a challenge.

So now after 20 years, we’ve had quite the time:

• Many (many!) breakdowns. All. The. Time.
• Loads of calls to the AA, all resulting in begging a RAC man to whack the car with a spanner
• A nice vintage boot rack falling off on the motorway, and watching it be destroyed by a lorry
• A bloke from a now-defunct garage stealing half the parts off the car then vanishing
• Almost selling it after a prolonged period of nagging from a (now-ex) missus
• An engine fire (forgot I had a fire extinguisher in the car, panicked and threw a bucket of water in the ‘bay)
• 2 days after that, an MOT pass
• An average of 10 people a year asking if I want to sell it
• Never having the sense to sell it

And here we are, and I still haven’t had the sense to sell it. In setting up this site and chronicling my experiences I hope to keep myself honest, keep the car going at least over the summer, and probably have another comedy record of the last time I tried to get the Beetle going… like the last time in 2012 I was excitedly telling the world that it was going to be a wedding car for 2013. Well… guess how well that turned out!

Anyway, ‘It’s Alive’…