End of an Era

Today Henry said goodbye to one of his most treasured possessions. Ever since I've known him he's had a Mini of some sort (except for a few years when babies and prams necessitated something bigger). Maybe it was his transport that drew me to him in 1966. At the time not many girls at Kendal High School had a boyfriend with a car. It wasn't exactly a car - but the start of his love affair with Mini Vans. Eventually this was sold (but only to his brother, so it was still in the family) and he bought a rather smart and flashy red Mini car. This was followed by a white one then a kingfisher blue one, before we succumbed the space of an small estate car to accommodate Victoria's pram. In the 1970's cars were smaller, but prams were bigger than now. We had managed to fit quite a bit in the back of the red mini (including a kitchen table and two chairs we bought in Liverpool).

We didn't come back to Minis for some time - though we had one of the first Mini Metros. In the 80's and 90's James had a Mini (crashed), I had a Mini (Victoria crashed) and eventually in 1993 Henry was reunited with his youth when he bought a Mini Van from an acquaintance in Old Hutton. It was more or less always in good running order for the first few years, but gradually became less reliable (probably from lack of use) and was sidelined; especially as I had bought a new Mini Cooper (thank you K Shoes for the redundancy money).

In 2006 the van had a major overhaul, passed it's MOT and was back on the road and occasionally taken out on the road. But it was kept inside, and not always easy or handy to get out, so once again it fell into disuse. And if you don't use something regularly, they tend to go downhill. It's been kept dry and out of the elements in the sheep building, but realistically we new we would probably not use it again. So when someone who was picking up some cow mats, saw it and confessed to being a complete Mini fanatic we thought it was too good an opportunity to miss.

And today there is just an empty space in the sheep building, and a few photographs of the van in it's prime. In the "olden days" (i.e. the 60/70/80's) we never took many photographs, and certainly not just of cars. Occasionally cars happened to be in photos of something else. I've rummaged through albums and drawers and found photos of all but one of our minis (the Kingfisher Blue Clubman), and arranged them into a sort of collage.

The quality is not the best, but here are

 Minis We Have Known.