Car Crushes: '98 Peugeot 106

Consider this my entry to my favourite Paris Review column.

Paddy the Peugeot on one of his last big trips

I’m not exactly sure why my brother named the car Paddy, other than its alliterative quality. But I kept it when the car was passed onto me in 2008, following two failed tests and a final pass thanks to Pinner’s more forgiving roads.

Before me, Paddy had already done a fair few miles, mostly between home and Southampton, where my brother was at university; as well as familiarising himself with those south west roads I’d drive him relentlessly up and down, thanks to a few Glastonbury summers. The 2003 parking badge of honour remained until we had to replace the back window thanks to a rogue pebble that was flicked up from the tarmac of my most traversed motorway and cracked the right corner cleanly and suddenly.

My tenure of the car lasted 15 years – five less than I would have preferred. A slight little thing, Paddy was a three-door hatchback that spent most of his life ferrying me up and down the M4 and M5, either fitting into near-impossible spaces in the back streets of Exeter or nipping down narrow lanes that snaked around the Helford River. To this day I maintain that he is the perfect shade of blue: a swirling conversation between dark navy and a marine hue that reminds me of the deepest Pacific ocean.

I once drove an American author from Somerset to west Wales for an event she was speaking at. It was peak summer. Owing to the car’s age and perpetual state of wear-and-tear, A/C was not an option. Besides, when it hit 20º, the air in the fan mimicked the outside temperature, which meant the windows were down for the whole journey: three and a half hours of roaring wind across the M5 and M4 but in a direction Paddy was not used to journeying. We shouted to each other above the noise, and she smiled and she said she liked the car – its lack of polish and finesse. Me too, I said, as I turned up the music on the CD player, my right palm resting on the warm exterior. Like me, Paddy performed best on those elastic summer days.

In his last couple of years, I shared Paddy with my partner at the time, who had developed a soft spot for the worn patterned seats and its material echos on the panelling underneath the front windows. “No matter what, keep the seats!”, our friend Rob, a car designer, implored. I promised that we would, imagining a makeshift sofa in the garage; an ode to a life that is constantly shifting gears.

On one of his last big trips, we drove him from south London to the Lake District to celebrate my 30th birthday and Paddy’s 23rd year. The steep peaks and troughs of the Lake’s terrain were testing. His weary 1.5 litre engine was tiring as we raced up and down – then there was the rock in the middle of the road that nicked the bottom of the catalytic converter, a part of the car I was particularly familiar with when the back of it dropped suddenly and dragged along a few hundred metres of the M23 on the way home from Brighton years earlier.

But he persisted, taking us from glittering tarns to rain-soaked mountain tops. We packed lunch and spent the first half of my birthday eating sandwiches inside because it poured and poured and poured.

A recipe for car lunches: cut two thick slices of white bloomer bread. Spread it thickly with soft butter. In one bowl add one egg yolk slowly whisk in good olive oil until it starts to emulsify and thicken. Squeeze half a lemon and one grated garlic clove. In a pestle and mortar crush two anchovy fillets and a tsp of capers until it forms a paste. Add it to the mayonnaise, as well as a tsp of chilli oil. In a separate bowl dress crunchy lettuce leaves with the other half of the lemon juice, a pinch of salt, a few twists of pepper and a small glug of extra virgin olive oil. Shower with parmesan and some chopped herbs. Add small pieces of rotisserie chicken to a bowl and stir in as much Caesary mayo as you’d like. Layer the sandwich with the chicken then the lettuce. Press firmly, cut in half then wrap in foil. Eat in your favourite car with your favourite person.

The irony is not lost on me that Paddy broke down on the same road that had carried me to my first love a couple of years earlier, and about a month before our relationship ran out of gas. I was driving down the A30, about 35 minutes out of Crantock where I’d been staying with my friend Becca, when I noticed the dreaded red light come on again. Steam started seeping out of the front bonnet (I thought that only happened in the movies), and I pulled over to a small service station near the quarry that always signals being close to home. I had two options: pay £120 to get my car towed back to Crantock, or pay less for it to get scrapped now and hitch a ride to the nearest station. I called him, and he said, what about the seats! Paddy rolled back down the A30 on his back wheels, and he remained in Cornwall for three months.

By the time I’d organised him to be scrapped, the relationship had been over for a month. I didn’t keep the seats because there was no longer a garage to put them in, and it felt too painful to go all the way back down to say goodbye. My friends Becca and Jack emptied 15 years worth of things from him, and sent me a final picture of the car being loaded onto the truck. Over the summer, I entered a strange period of mourning; perhaps mostly for the relationship that had abruptly ended, but also for Paddy and everything that came and went with him over our decade and a half together.

Two years on, I’m still carless. I sometimes drive my parents’ Honda Civic, which in comparison feels like a spaceship, appropriately alien and far too smooth for my liking. I dream of driving my little go-kart at sunset with the windows down and the music turned up, alone and probably eating a sandwich.