Another death in the family. A true and loyal friend over the course of three decades – the great majority of my life – my father’s car is to be consigned to scrap. It didn’t pass its MOT, and the cost of remedying its many failings is prohibitively high. And so, it is time to say goodbye.
The news is not exactly a surprise; the Passat’s decline has been ongoing for years. It has been quite some time since it could accurately be described as “reliable”. The air-con no longer works, and one of the back windows is held in place with doorstops to prevent it from falling entirely and irretrievably into the body of the car. Dad took it off the road a few years ago, when London’s ultra low emission zone was expanded to cover the suburb where he lived. By the end of its life, it was used only for camping holidays and occasional trips to the tip, and then less still, once Dad was too unwell to drive.
There can’t be many cars that make it to 27, and even fewer that are owned by the same person for all those 27 years. It is so old that, when it was registered in 1998, I was six – young enough to have memorised its number plate by the names of primary-school friends: Miranda, Georgina, Nicholas; MGN. In the end, my relationship with the Passat outlasted all of them.
It was first our family car, then the car that carted us between our parents’ houses after their separation. It took me to friends’ homes for teenage parties, and between flats at university. To Lancashire to see my grandparents, and further, to the west coast of Scotland, where we camped every year. (One of the many reminders of Dad’s conspicuous absence on our camping holiday this summer was that he – and only he – knew the precise way to fit all the gear into the saloon’s awkward, shallow boot; no one else was allowed to touch it.) One summer, when my eldest brother and I were teenagers, we drove to the south of France. The back seat wasn’t wide enough to fit both of us with our shoulders square, plus our younger brother’s car seat, and so we had to take it in turns to lean back.
Although we had CDs at home, the Passat only had a tape player, and so my brother and I manually recorded albums on to tapes for the car, pressing play on one and record on the other, then dashing out of the room to ensure minimal background noise. This rather limited our options, and those long drives to Scotland were passed to a repetitive soundtrack of the White Stripes’ De Stijl, Cornershop’s When I Was Born for the 7th Time and the first volume of Queen’s Greatest Hits. Later, once iPhones were a thing, there was a new contraption – a tape with a wire that somehow allowed us to play our iTunes through the car speakers.
One of the Passat’s most intrepid journeys took place without me. My dad and stepmother drove to the Netherlands one blisteringly hot summer, with the intention of buying a tent, my little brother – then a toddler – in the back with a stomach bug. They did not, in fact, buy a tent, and gave no thought to how a three-day round trip with nothing to show for it might appear to officials, until they reached the border. Their lame excuses about going to buy a tent but then not doing so proved unconvincing. The stand-off was soon resolved when the border guard, searching the boot, came across a bag of soiled toddler clothes, at which point the car was swiftly waved on.
The Passat is, in the end, just a banged-up old car, and it will be long outlived by the memories made in it. But it is also another piece of Dad, gone; another piece of the world that was, lost. It is the end of an era, a nail in the coffin, or some other such cliché. I can’t help but think of the Passat as one half of those terribly romantic couples, married for 70 years, who die within weeks of each other. Or perhaps it is a grizzled dog, lost and forlorn after the death of its beloved owner, the kindest thing for it being to have it put down. On my more melancholy, fanciful days, it is tempting to imagine Dad somewhere, elsewhere, in need of his trusty ride, and calling it home with the push of a car key.
[Further reading: Does Keir Starmer understand George Orwell?]
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This article appears in the 01 Oct 2025 issue of the New Statesman, Life and Fate
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