Ah - the Bond 250. When I was 13, a guy in our street bought one (the 5th car in our estate of 350 houses). We had very small front gardens with a 2 foot wall around and just a pedestrian gate. Obvious, isn't it - 8 of us lifted the Bond over the wall and 'parked' it in the garden. He knew who the culprits were, but we stck together and pleaded innocence.

I have fond memories of a Montego 2-litre turbo-diesel Estate - one of the last, so it had all the extras thrown in. The best of these was the self-levelling rear suspension. I bought it 9 months old and did 95,000 miles in it, a large part of which was transporting materials for my barn conversion. Two trips stick in my mind.

Our walking group did a 2-day walk and we needed to get back to the start - the Montego carried 7 adults with full kit for 25 miles. The exhaust scraped a bit as we started, but the suspension soon pumped up.

The best was a trip to the south of France to a friend's old mill. Four adults, everything for a 10-day holiday plus 400 lb of toolboxes in the boot. I did Saint-Malo to Avignon (about 1000kms) in one hop each way, cruising at 90mph most of the time. When we got back to Exeter and I filled up, the average fuel consumption was 50.2 mpg.

Phil