Gerald’s just back from Florence. Two-and-a-half-thousand miles in the old Aston, thunderous straight six booming all over the Alps. ‘Took the Gothard Pass out of Switzerland. Bloody marvellous. You could hear us coming three valleys away! The old girl almost boiled over at seven thousand feet. The Aston was pretty, hot too, hahaha, wasn’t she, Lucinda?’ 

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Long-suffering Lucinda, who has been married to Gerald for 48 challenging years, has heard all the stories before and only winces inwardly. The ‘jokes’, innuendo and double entendres about big end rebuilds, lubing the shaft, greasing the nipples and piston slap are more wearying than wounding these days. 

The Aston in question, Gerald will tell anyone who’s interested – and plenty more who aren’t – is a rare, 1962 Lagonda Rapide, based on the DB4, with a four-litre inline six and twin overhead cam, styled by Carozzeria Touring over a Superleggera steel tube frame. It’s worth a couple of hundred thousand, give or take, but he insists it’s an ‘understated gentleman’s car’, perhaps failing to understand the meaning of either word. 

Gerald is a retired banker, a ruddy-faced Home Counties septuagenarian. Decades of generous lubrication with the good stuff from Château Palmer, Romanée-Conti,........

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