There are many reasons to love a Deux Chevaux. It sipped petrol. The top rolled down. You could unclip the seats and park them in a field for a picnic (although why a blanket wouldn't do just fine was never explored).
The service bills were laughably tiny. Once, when I'd burned out the clutch, the mechanic came to my flat and started working on the car out in the busy London street.
"Shouldn't we tow it to your garage?" I asked. "Don't need to, mate," he replied, twirling a spanner under the bonnet. "Ere, 'old this a sec."
He handed me the engine (OK, he'd had to use both hands to get it out, but still).
Any way you looked at it, the 2CV was a remarkable car, dreamed up by Pierre-Jules Boulanger in 1935 with the specification that it should be capable of carrying four people and 50kg of potatoes at 60km/h while burning no more than 3 litres every 100km.
That spec evolved to allow a farmer to drive at 60km/h - with his boots and straw hat on - with a tray of eggs across a ploughed field without breaking any eggs.But, according to my streetside mechanic, the real spec was that a farmer should be able to drive himself, an overweight farmhand and two fully grown pigs across a ploughed field at 60km/h. And a case of Camembert.
The only real agreement was the top speed, which on this day I was happily exceeding. Even so, Sunday slipped away and Cherbourg seemed to recede into the distance even as we ate the miles.
Things came to a head at a chaotic village roundabout. According to French driving etiquette of the time, traffic already in the roundabout had to give way to traffic entering. The result: instant, Gauloises-fuelled carnage. I panicked and stalled the car.
Hot from its long run up the péage, the bugger refused to restart.Desperate, I held the ignition key against the stop and let the starter motor pull us out of the chaos in little, shuddering jerks.
That killed the starter motor, which was pointed out to us by a kindly old man who had come to watch the show. With his help, we push-started the little beast and flew on.
I calculated that, at a mile a minute, we would arrive in Cerbourg at 6pm. And we did. And it was great, and we rolled down the long hill to the harbour, the Citroën spluttering and smoking and making expensive noises.That was about the same time I realised that there is no point in chasing the ferry if you've got the sailing time wrong by an hour.
The Last Boat To England was no more than a smudge on the sunstruck horizon.
• Do you have a funny or quirky story about your travels? Send 600 words to travelmag@sundaytimes.co.za and include a recent photograph of yourself for publication with the column...