The eye-catching 1950s advertisement for the Ford Anglia (“Beyond Comparison”) caught my attention as the accompaniment to a book review in The Times recently, since this was the very model in which my career as a motorist began.

My 1956 Anglia 100E was in a fetching two-tone green with, as I remember, interior trim and upholstery in which maroon figured prominently.

In this I could be totally wrong – about the maroon, I mean – for the ownership I am describing began precisely half a century ago.

What I shall never forget is the ‘feel’ of driving the car – the long and wobbly stick that gave control of the three forward gears (my present car has six), and the cream plastic steering wheel on which there was so much play that non-stop adjustments were necessary for consistent movement in the required direction.

It takes little effort, as it happens, for me to think myself back into the driving position of any car I have owned or, in some cases, merely driven. This characteristic seems to be shared with many (all?) drivers.

A peculiarity of my Anglia were windscreen wipers operated by means of compressed air. This derived somehow from the engine, so that when it was working hard – going up a hill, say – the blades’ movement ceased. This did not make for fearless driving in the rain.

The primitive nature of driving in my early days behind the wheel was vividly set out by the humorist Michael Green – the inventor of ‘course rugby’ and eventually lots of other course activities too, including acting and sex – in his 1990 autobiography Nobody Hurt in Small Earthquake.

The title is taken, by the way, from what a sub-editor on The Times once invented as this austere newspaper’s quintessentially dull headline.

Green, who died earlier this year aged a very decent (for a hard-drinking journalist) 91, wrote of the suicidal cost of his 1935 Ford Eight Y-Front Popular.

“For a year it bled me white with its demands for oil, petrol, tyres, insurance, licensing and repairs, and very nearly turned my hair grey with its habit of wandering all over the road while the steering wheel remained central.

“It was a crazy world [that of the junk car owner] where nylon stockings replaced broken fan belts, old cocoa tins mended leaky exhausts, and oatmeal was poured into sieve-like radiators to block the holes.

“At times I got the impression the whole car was held together by Halfords . . . The exhaust leaked into the car and I wondered whether to carry a canary like miners to to test for gas.”

Ah! the stockings and oatmeal. Both figured in repairs carried out by me on the 1963 Morris Minor Traveller which, six years after its construction, became my second car.

Quite where it had been in its earlier life was a matter for conjecture. My guess, to judge by the state of its undercarriage, was a Siberian salt mine.

On the second day of my ownership, when I was living in Sheffield, the brakes failed completely on my descent of steep Brocco Bank towards the Ecclesall Road roundabout. Mercifully, I was able to stop using the handbrake.

The brake pipes were badly rusted, it turned out, as was most of the metal not on obvious view. Ongoing bouts of welding were the story of the next five years.

The expenses involved in running this car, to a penurious cub reporter, were formidable, eating seriously into funds urgently required for beer and fags.

But even those car bills weren’t as bad as some I have experienced since. Two weeks ago, I paid £820 to replace a light bulb on the Volvo. (A new headlight unit was required.)

The Morris Traveller – in whose half-timbered chassis I grew cress – came with me to Oxford in 1973 but did not long survive.

Sentenced to death after a failed MOT, the car ended up in the hands of a local lad – Ian Beesley, 14-year-old son of The Fishes landlord John, since you ask – who wanted a bit of driving practice off road.

Off road he went, and along the ruts of a ploughed field the car fell in half, literally splitting down the middle.

It seemed a somehow suitable ending.

THE visual amenity of my house, in a quiet cul-de-sac on Osney Island, has been slightly impaired of late by the presence of a cluster of orange and grey Mobikes at the entrance to the street.

One seemed to attract others and eventually six were lined up, with no one keen to leap into the saddle and ride them away.

Their presence stirred my curiosity concerning Osney’s evident popularity with the unlock-and-go community.

On a quick tour of the island (on my bike), I counted 15 more Mobikes including three strewn in the grounds of St Frideswide’s Church.

“So what?” will be the reaction of most people to this information and it is, I suppose, mine too.

I merely note that the littering of our streets, parks and riverside walks with garishly coloured steeds is a price that must be paid for keeping he populace on the move.

My own enthusiasm for cycling is often mentioned here. Only last week it was expressed in the context of my dislike of using a bicycle bell, which I liken to the rudeness of parping a car horn.

Even as I wrote came news that the transport minister Jesse Norman is considering making their use compulsory in a “large-scale review” (do newspapers report of any others?) of cycling laws.

For 20 years – and this was news to me – it has been mandatory for new bikes to be sold with bells. This followed a petition by a woman whose guide dog was hit by a silently approaching bike.

My bike was equipped with one when I bought it 10 years ago and has been fitted with perhaps five or six others in the years since.

This illustrates the point that the wretched things, with cheap sprung hammer design, quickly break, as a correspondent pointed out in a letter last week to The Times.

Better, perhaps, to take the advice from another Times reader that a polite “Good morning” is all that is needed for a cyclist to warn other people of their presence.

I HAVE often wondered what became of Beckley farmer’s boy Harold Claire, and just possibly I might find out on Saturday night.

Claire was a boozing companion of the novelist Evelyn Waugh, a regular visitor to the village’s Abingdon Arms pub in the 1920s, initially with his boyfriend Alastair Graham.

Later, he was to honeymoon there with his bride, the so-called She-Evelyn [Gardner]. He was also in residence, and busily writing his second hugely successful novel Vile Bodies, when he received a letter from her revealing the infidelity that was to lead to their divorce.

Waugh’s connection with the Abingdon Arms is being celebrated on Saturday with the unveiling of a blue plaque there by Waugh’s grandson Alexander.

The ceremony will be followed by a “a big feast” at the pub in imitation of one that took place there on the very same date, July 28, in 1924, with Waugh and Graham in attendance.

Waugh recorded in his diary: “First there were sports and a cricket match and then at 4 an enormous meal in the big barn next to the pub.

“It was a most delightful evening. Harold Claire was very, very drunk, but an excellent host to Alastair and myself, continually filling our glasses and introducing us to people. We danced with Mrs Mattingley [the landlady] several times and drank pints of beer.

“We went to bed long before it was over. Later we heard that it ended with Harold hitting the policeman on the head and then falling down in the road and cutting himself open.”

Nothing so indecorous, I trust, will be occurring at tomorrow’s ‘do’, for which some tickets are still available, price £43 (01865 655667).

Smoked duck, confit trout and braised ox cheek figure on the menu.

I will be there. Report next week.