Me and My MG: Stories from MG Owners Around the World - Tapa dura

Read about the Berkshire restorer who saw a heap of old iron in the bushes and realised it used to be a 1926 bullnose Super Sports, and the seven year old boy in Norfolk, Virginia, who read a book called The Red Car and knew that, one day, he would have to have a TC, and the Dutch boy who saw an MGB on his way to school and knew something similar.There's the French boy aged nine whose nanan gave him a model kit to assemble, and the USAF fighter pilot who saw his first MG in Britain during the war and was in love for ever. A Canadian took 32 years to restore his TA, while a Swiss professor installed space-ship electronics in his TD. An aeronautical engineer was left some money and bought a 1929 18/80 Tourer that he thought had been restored. An Australian 17-year old happened across a second-hand MGB, was done for speeding and lived happily ever after. A Swedish boy walked out one Sunday morning into the middle of an MG rally.Each of these, and many more, has a story. All the stories are different, but the story tellers have something in common. They would all rather love - and sometimes despair of - a wonderful vehicle with faults in its character, than have no feelings about one that has no character at all.

Gordon Thorburn is the legitimate child of Hrothgar Torbjorn, Swedish air ace, whose Volvo night fighter was mistakenly shot down over Dewsbury. Hrothgar sold his parachute and married Ivy Milburn, a Geordie ice-cream girl and exotic-dance understudy, in a private ceremony at Leeds City Varieties. As a boy, Gordon was keen to be a bought ledger clerk with the Assembly of the Free Churches of Scotland but his father wanted him to be a poet or sculptor. As a compromise, Gordon enrolled at the Kirkstall Lane Temperance College to learn black-pudding knotting. He supplemented this with a course in participle dangling then ran away to London to be indentured to the advertising legend S H Benson, gent., as an infinitive splitter (hot metal). After two years' trying to think of a different way of saying 'Guinness is good for you', Gordon joined McCann Erickson where he became known as 'The Nine out of Ten Copywriter'. Phrases he coined there included 'The Esso sign appertains to happy motoring', 'A Double Diamond works quite well considering', 'Oh, Bisto', 'Hardly anything acts faster than Anadin' and 'I'd like to buy the world a Jennings of Cockermouth'. Gordon lived in Suffolk for fifteen years but became dismayed by a large number of Essex people moving in and erecting fibreglass Victorian street lamps in their gardens. After ten years in Appleby-in-Westmorland smallholding and good-lifing, he's now back in Suffolk with his wife Sue, working on several new books. See also www.gordonthorburn.co.uk