Messerschmitt.

I bought this yesterday from a stall close to where I found Speedy Gonzales. It looks to me like a Messerschmitt car. I have always been amazed with the way that some Europeans will try to get as many MPG as they can. There's nothing wrong with that. I am considering getting rid of my 17 year old Citroen because it does not give me a satisfactory return for my investment in petrol. It has still done just 40,ooo and apart from it being a bit of prat magnet, I will be sorry to see it going to the great recyclers not in the sky, but on the property of our local millionaire. Returning to the attempt to get better MPG, I have seen Italian peasants, smoking grease stained roll-ups, driving little Fiat rotavators with a huge trailer drawing enormous loads. The French of course are very tight, and it takes them all their time to part even with wind. They used to ride moped machines, which had a tiny petrol engine, fitted rather like a dynamo on a push bike. I have seen here in sub-tropical Lancashire, a sort of electric powered sort of push bike, ridden oddly enough by a greasy roll-up smoking motor mechanic. The roll-ups and the mechanic. I used to work alongside an Italian terrazo tiler called Arturo. He had a propensity to smoke very slim, yep, grease stained roll-ups. He had a unique way of swearing using a mixture of dramatic gestures, and a mixture of Sicilian/ Lancashire dialect. He used to frequently grumble, "Artur, Artur , Artur all the fucking a day a long," as he pushed his very heavy grout removing machine.
Returning to the Messerschmitt, when I worked in the B.T. green cabinet, outside British Aerospace in Strand Road Preston, there used to be a pair of these splendid machines parked on some wasteland across from the factory gates. They truly were beautiful machines, and the story was that they were fashioned from no longer required aeroplane parts. I really don't know or care if that is true. I just thought that they were a joy to behold, and had an almost sensuous shape like a racing dinghy. I feel fairly certain that they would be easy to maintain, and good on gas. Possibly their owners smoked the aromatic Old Holborn, (once my favourite) or the plebeian Golden Virginia. Of course it goes without saying, that as engineers, they would probably have had greasy fingers.
Adios.