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Motoring

Maggie – A Lifelong MG Love Affair

By Tom McCooey

Maggie has been an almost constant presence in Tom McCooey’s life.

An old MG Magnette, she was not much to look at and desperately in need of some love and attention. But to young Tom, sitting in the driver’s seat, smelling the brittle leather and gripping the huge steering wheel, what was sitting in his parents’ garage was more than just his dad’s old car.

He had never seen Maggie move or heard the engine roar into life, but the fact his dad, Will, wouldn’t let go added to the magic and mystique. Aged 14, Tom embarked on bringing the characterful car back to life with Will, but life threw diversions in front of Maggie’s journey back to the road. Tom’s new priorities – including Bon Jovi – ensured the car stayed put and Will’s dream on hold.

Told through the view from the passenger and driver’s seats of the cars throughout Tom’s life, this love affair with the road – and Maggie – has not always been smooth, as each small victory uncovered another seemingly insurmountable problem.

But with understanding, supportive and capable people around them, from family, mechanics and friends willing to push an old car up a hill, will the pieces of Tom and Maggie’s journeys gradually come together in a tribute Will would have been proud of?

For Tom, it was never about what the car was, or might be, worth but preserving something central to his family’s history, and a 36-year perseverance to finally see the job through.

This is a story of restoration in its widest sense. Not just of a classic car but a son paying homage to his father; it’s about relationships, dealing with grief and finding perspective and true value.

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Driving The Real Great North Road

by Andy Bull

Just saying the name conjures up the golden age of motoring: a time when the open road spelled freedom and adventure, and when driving was fun.
Once, The Great North Road was spoken of as the UK’s own version of America’s Route 66: the Mother Road, threading its way across this green and pleasant land, linking the capitals of London and Edinburgh, taking in the great cities of York and Newcastle, numerous market towns and villages whose old coaching inns now catered for a new, romantic breed: the motorist. But all of that has long gone. Hasn’t it?
Isn’t the Great North Road now dead: buried by the A1, with its motorway-grade stretches and ubiquitous town by-passes?
Not a bit of it. Because the A1 is not the Great North Road. Realignment, renumbering, re-routing and extensive upgrading have meant that it bears little relation to the original highway. No more than a quarter of the modern A1 follows the route of the true Great North Road.
So, has that evocatively-named highway been wiped off the map? Actually, no.
These days it is hidden, renumbered as, among others, the B197, the A602, and the B656, but often still known locally as The Great North Road. All it has lost is the traffic that grew and grew until it clogged this great national artery.
That old, original route can still be driven the 400 miles from capital to capital, on a journey that does indeed have much in common with cruising America’s Route 66.
Driving the Real Great North Road is travel writer Andy Bull’s account of doing just that.
It’s also about re-living a time when the road, in the words of JB Priestley, cut through towns like a knife through cheese; when it guided stars from Sting to Bryan Ferry, Mark Knopfler to Eric Burdon, to fame and fortune; when Dorothy L Sayers found a road “that winds away like a long, flat, steel-grey ribbon – a surface like a race-track, without traps, without hedges, without side-roads, and without traffic.”
All you need to do is find the old road first. Let Andy show you how.

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