Things I Like, Part 3 – A Nice Big Citroen

I like a nice, big Citroen. I always have. La Déesse was just a little before my time but I used to see them occasionally wafting around the place when I was younger. They were always slightly scruffy and I didn’t really get them. I got the CX though. It was a spaceship when everything else was a donkey cart. It came from the future. The rest of the carscape came from the Midlands and was local authority blue, depression brown or baby-shit yellow if you were really lucky. The CX was as long as a street and as low as a snake’s expectations. It didn’t make the swooshing noise I wanted it to but that was its only disappointment. I almost bought one once. A dealer in Hull had a CX20 Croisette for sale and I took it for a test drive one grey afternoon. It was so wide it barely got through the narrow passage from the dealer onto the street without scraping its shapely door mirrors. The brakes were a little odd but I quickly got used to them. I loved the view down the bonnet and our reflection in shop windows as we passed by.

The XM was a little more conventional. It still had oleopneumatic suspension like the DS and CX before it. The suspension was the subject of more electronic control than previously which meant it was even more complicated. Citroen offered a V6 and a diesel in the UK but the majority were four cylinder petrols. My brother had one for a while. His was a dark green auto with a four cylinder light pressure turbo engine. He had to enter a PIN using a keypad every time he wanted to turn the engine on. That would have driven me insane but he is calmer than I am. He and his wife drove me and my former partner from Edinburgh to Loch Ness and back in a day to visit some friends on holiday there. It was the most comfortable drive of my life. He is an excellent driver, a police Class 1 instructor in fact and very smooth at the wheel. The car suited him and his driving style down to the ground.They have a reputation for shonky electronics but surely all the bad ones will have died by now. You can find them for pennies. Have a look.

All this nostalgie was provoked by the sight this afternoon of a C6 on sale at Marshall’s on Newmarket Road in Cambridge. This one is grey but has the pale leather interior. It has the usual mad C6 interior with its head up display in place of a convention set of instruments. Its five years old and has 43,000 miles on what passes for its clock in the HUD. It’s a 2.7 litre V6 turbodiesel just like the one which used to live in the Jaguar XF and Land Rover Discovery. It’ll cost its new owner in the region of £12,000 which is a bit of a loss on its new price but not completely disastrous. These are rare cars and in demand from people like me who adore their style and smooth ride. I am sorely, sorely tempted to snap this one up even though I can’t really justify having a car like this as long as I have my company car. I’ll almost certainly find something equally unsuitable tomorrow but this is enough for today.