The last thing you expect to have on your tail these days is a Morris Minor. But that looks like being my lot for years to come. Earlier this year, I couldn't get enough of the little rounded cars, famously damned by their reluctant maker Viscount Nuffield as "poached eggs". Everyone I met was quizzed: did they have one? Had their parents? What about their grannies, sisters, cousins, aunts?
I met people who'd raced them, scraped fungus off them for primary school nature tables, turned one into a mechanical lobster and applied to be buried with theirs when they (the person, not the engine) died. It was lovely and I learned that the two words "Morris" and "Minor" were a sure way of getting almost anyone to go all soft and say: "Aahhhh."
It was necessary, too, because my task at the time was write the car's biography to celebrate its 60th birthday, a worthy occupation because the Minor is a case study in sociology as well as a classic piece of design. It was the first British car to sell a million and in the process achieved an exceptional lovability, or more precisely, a knack of making people extraordinarily fond of it. Anyone in need of this – a politician, a suitor, a parent or a child – should study Morris Minorism from A-Z and see how it can be done.
A is for Alec Issigonis, the car's inspirational Levantine creator (assisted by Reg Job and Vic Oak who were as village-blacksmithy Brit as their names). Z is for…, well, Z is difficult actually, unless you nerdishly include the Series Z Post Office van which the bright red Minor version replaced in 1953.
In between is everything else; but that's all in the book. My purpose here is to warn other nascent biographers, who don't already know, that a baby like this seems to be for life. Morris Minor, the Biography: 60 Years of Britain's Favourite Car has been out for just two weeks, but already I have 14 new anecdotes, two phone messages and three promises from relations to tell me about theirs when we meet at the extended family party on Boxing Day.
"My Dad only got rid of his when he was overtaken by a pedestrian when he was 85 and driving to the pub," starts one recollection. "Our neighbour kept hers even when it stopped going," begins another, "because unlike modern cars it was strong enough for her stand on without the metal dimpling when she was cutting her hedge."
Does this happen to mightier biographers? Was Morley beset with details he had omitted about Gladstone? Does Michael Holroyd ever escape from enthusiasts for Augustus John and George Bernard Shaw, or Claire Tomalin wriggle out from under the shadows of Hardy and Pepys?
The last two perhaps provide the answer: finish A and move on to B, which I am now about to do with a sequel on the Mini, which is 50 next year. That, and perhaps, in tune with modern interactive publishing, a couple of blank pages between the index and the back cover, for readers who aren't included to write their own experiences down.
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