WHEELS: ME AND MY MOTOR - JEREMY IRONS
by Kathy Sweeney, The Guardian (London)
May 5, 1997
I drive an Audi A6 quatro estate. I need my car to be a lot of things: fun to drive, but able to take five of us and three dogs. I need a car that is safe and sometimes looks smart. It's not cheap, but not the most expensive either.
I also have a BMW cruising bike. I like horse riding and I like the outdoors, and a motorcycle is an urban horse - it has the same danger, and it keeps you in touch with the environment. I enjoy the fact that it gets me in and out of London in reasonable time. I would love to campaign to encourage people to bike because, as I see people in traffic jams, I think what a stupid way to spend an hour and a huge waste of time and money.
You're much less like to survive an accident riding a motorcycle, so being a rider must make you more careful car driver as well. Motor-cycles take up less space and get into smaller gaps. I recently had a widely reported accident where I tried to avoid someone coming round the corner towards me, and although I got on to a verge, we still hit wing-to-wing. Had I been on a bike. I would have missed him completely. So for some time after that I felt safer on a bike than in a car. I used to have a little Honda 50 when I lived in London, but I took up serious motorcycling at 40. I also have a Volkswagen rag-top Beetle as we used to call them, which I bought new 18 years ago. The nanny uses the VoIkswagen; my son will inherit it if he wants it.
My very first car was a Morris Minor soft-top with split windscreen which I bought off an artist in Victoria who gave me a lift down the newly opened M4 one Sunday. I said to him: 'If you ever want to sell this, I'll buy it,' and he called me on Monday and said I could have it for a fiver. I bought it, and it stalled going round Parliament Square with my aged Scottish landlady who'd come with me. She and I had to get out and push it. The little I know about mechanics I learned on that engine.
I look through the motoring magazines and dream. I wouldn't mind having a Bentley Continental, but I've never driven one. I'd feel embarrassed by driving around in something which costs that amount of money.
This is why the Audi is an extraordinary car: you can park it in the seedier parts of London and it won't raise temperatures and make people want to knock in a window or scratch it. It's a fairly anonymous, unless you look closely and think 'That's a nice bit of kit'. So I think even if I could have any car I wanted, I'd stick with the Audi.