This is possibly one of the most beautiful examples of motor car I have ever seen. It's a Citroën SM, built between 1970 and 1975. It was fiendishly modern at the time it was made, bettering anything we could produce here. Lee Majors and the Shah of Iran drove about in one. Idi Amin, apparently, had seven. It's considered by many to be one of the coolest cars ever made.
But what makes this can beautiful isn't just its looks and pedigree, but the fact that it's still being used, daily. It's far from being in show condition. There are patches of rust, it's sometimes dirty and it's not kept sheltered from the rain in a heated lock-up - it sits on a narrow street not too far from Waterloo station.
You can draw comparisons between cars and couture; they're examples that highlight the some of the best of human design and craftsmanship. The artistry that goes into a car is no less than that which goes into creating a ball gown, and the mechanical skill that goes into creating that dress is as complex as that which creates the car's engine.
I don't tend to draw many life lessons from Friends, but I was strangely moved by the episode where Ross tells Phoebe that she's killing the spirit of the bike he bought her by not riding it.
Automobiles, like clothes, are not meant to sit unused. A vintage dress shouldn't hang, under dust covers, in a wardrobe and a vintage car shouldn't sit, under dust covers, in a garage.
Every designer puts a little bit of themselves into their creations. This is true of the man who designs hole-punches for a living, and its truer still of those creations where the designer's afforded some degree of artistic freedom.
To preserve these creations is one thing, but to treat them as museum pieces, kept hidden from the world, is to deny the expression of their creators. It undermines the soul of these works of art and defeats the object of them being made at all.