Gearing down: tales from a colour-conscious rev head

Call me a slow starter, but I acquired my first automatic car in 2008. (I'm not counting my yellow, gearless pedal car with contrasting black wheels and steering wheel.) That's about 45 years after I started driving. I'm sounding like an early boomer, I know, but I got serious about driving grown-up  cars when I was 10. Around and around I'd go — on our circular driveway in my mother's emerald green VW Beetle, before advancing to my father's chartreuse Carmen Ghia.

I can see there's a green theme, because my first car was an olive green Fiat 850 Sports, followed by an altogether murkier green Morris, then a chartreuse Beetle. My last manual car was an emerald green Golf, so I haven't strayed far from my roots.

I can also see there's a gear theme, no doubt fuelled by my playmate who had a blue American pedal car with contrasting white wheels and steering wheel — and gears. Later, I would watch my parents moving smoothly through the gears — the column shift on my father's Vauxhall, the floor shift on my mother's Triumph Herald, the column shift on the Rover, and especially the funky rod on the Citroen DS (Deesse or 'goddess') sedans which shot out from beside the steering wheel and had a white ball on the end.

Only the French would marry the designs of an Italian sculptor and a French aeronautical engineer in an automobile, hence the DS's hydropneumatic suspension. It was semi-automatic with a gear stick but no clutch, and the gears still had to be shifted by hand. Our first DS will always hold a special place in heart because it ferried me through the rite of passage that formally made me a driver — the long-awaited L plates.

Even philosophers took note of the DS. Roland Barthes, in his essay 'The new Citroen 1957', described it as a "new Nautilus", and said it, "looked as though it had fallen from the sky … One is obviously turning from an alchemy of speed to a relish of driving."

And that's what I had — a relish of driving. You've guessed it, in my own quiet and colour-conscious way, I'm a rev head.