Rust Never Sleeps

After photographing a pair of rusty cast iron gravestones in a Northamptonshire churchyard, I poked my nose over the wall and was confronted by this. Scrapyards are usually very oily places with precariously stacked-up vehicles- Morris Marinas at the bottom, Lancia Deltas at the top- and boiler-suited men trying to restrain slavering Alsatians. But here is the scrapyard that even time forgot, the bucolic answer to North Circular razor wire and covert car crushing. Commentator Diplomat confirms that this is a Bedford A3, c1955. Even without its nearside wing the shape is so seductive, so reminiscent of its American GM counterparts. You won't see many around now, but diecast afficianados will perhaps remember its cab and chassis put to use as a Pallet-Jekta Van (No.930), with the Dinky Toys logo on the side and a winding handle that chucked pallets out the back. And something else I've just learnt. How many of us thought that these trucks were given the name Bedford because they were made in Bedfordshire? Not so apparently. It comes from Bedford Motors in London, who first imported Buicks in 1910. Now I wait for someone to tell me that Luton vans were made in Tamworth.

Hot Oil & Blue Exhaust

I include this old boy because there are frequent visitors to this blog (you know who you are) who will get very, very, excited by it. Not for them the pristine over-restored specimens paraded in front of admiring crowds at agricultural shows- 'And here's Dick Blogwort on his 1953 Mudslinger, good to see you here again Dick'- but far rather something half-disintegrating into a hedge.This will be pulled out by an equally disintegrating Landrover in order to spend another five years distintegrating further in the corner of a dusty barn with sparrows twittering up in the roof, half-covered in a grimy tarpaulin. I just love it, it's that Pleasing Decay thing that John Piper introduced us to, the fact that some things are very satisfying if just left alone to disappear of their own accord. Not that this tractor wouldn't be fun to drive again- at least two of my commentators would have it going in seconds however long it had been resting-up on this patch of Rutland. A tuneless fanfare through a rolled-up copy of the Farmers Weekly for the first to identify it.