Buying Candice

Being, as I am, a fan of the Morris Minor I have a saved search for them on eBay which I'd often look at but they're all too much money, or too far away, or absolute basket cases...

Until one day one popped up on there, a few miles from home, within my fairly modest budget, and in relatively good nick, although not running.

So I messaged the seller, Steve (who, incidentally, runs a nice little local record shop) we had a nice chat on the phone about Morris Minors, Peugeot 205s (his daily driver, and another of my favourite cars), classic cars in general, the simplicity of old machines, stuff like that. And a few days later my brother and I went to a field to look at the car. It had been sat in the field for about a year and sat in garage for something like five before that. Despite this, it was decidedly not bad. There was rust, but not too much and it mostly seems to be surface, as mentioned the engine didn't run, and a couple of the brakes were stuck on. Steve told us he'd named the car Candice-Marie, after Alison Steadman's character in Nuts in May, the 1975 Mike Leigh Play for Today - in which the main characters drive a Minor convertible - and how he once bumped into Mike Leigh at the tip of all places and told him about the car. I hadn't seen Nuts in May (still haven't, must get round to it!) but I did enjoy Abigail's Party, another 70s BBC Play for Today directed by Mike Leigh, and starring Alison Steadman, and the name somehow suited the car. So it's stuck. A little bit of a project, but not an impossible undertaking. So I made him an offer, he accepted, and a few days later Steve, my brother, and I were back in the field one evening, waiting for a friend with a recovery truck to join us.