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What do you do when it gets too hot? That's right—you head down to the cool basement. And that's where all sorts of stuff is stored—old memories and artifacts from your past life—things you don't think you can do without. Yet it's been years since you last held them in your hands.
In the digital age, this increasingly includes “real” photos—the kind that lie in a box as paper prints, or perhaps were once neatly pasted into an album.
That's how I recently came across this photo, which was taken by my girlfriend at the time around Easter 1995 in Alsace. As I can see from it, my hair was even longer back then, while I weighed significantly less. And back then, no one ever saw me dressed in anything other than black.
The car has also been a topic of discussion here before. I bought my 1973 Citroën DS in 1994 on a student budget. The car had just under 150,000 kilometers on the odometer at the time, so it had just been broken in. However, the bodywork had been “restored” by a “specialist shop” for the previous owner in 1984 for what was a lot of money at the time. That meant they'd used a lot of body filler and sealed holes in the C-pillars with silicone sealant. But I didn't know that back then. The only thing was that the trunk was always damp, and the carpet smelled musty afterward. Plus, the door panels were warped and had cracks in two places.
None of this bothered me, though. Because this car was my ticket to another world. For example, it opened up the left lane on the highway to me. With the 2CV and the VW bus, those had previously been places I only ventured into in the most extreme emergencies—like when passing a truck. But with the DS's 130 PS—a 23er Injection—I could tap the turn signal with relative ease whenever someone got in my way. Beyond 120 km/h, however, the very loosely mounted, fluttering windshield would let water pump into the cabin when it rained, and at 170 km/h—tested, of course, “only” on the German autobahn—the side mirror tucked aerodynamically close to the body.
But the comfort, the relative fuel efficiency—roughly on par with the T1 camper van—and the car's presence were well worth these minor drawbacks. Later, I stripped the car down, repainted it, and drove it for a few more years until I absolutely had to own a car of a completely different design—a Lotus Super 7. But by then, my hair was already much shorter.
