One of last week's tasks was a garden overhaul for aged relative. On with the gloves, out with saw and clippers and the hedge trimmer and secateurs, and then, inevitably all into a van to get the mountain of debris to the composting centre. Bits of dead furniture to be removed at the same time, so a hired van would earn its day's rental.
I would probably have done best to get a Transit, but underestimated the loads involved, so I asked for an "Escort-sized van", not knowing sort of model what to expect these days. I paid my money and got a Citroën Berlingo, to which I paid little attention initially: my interest was mostly in keeping up my energy levels for what turned out to be 24 hours of humping-and-dumping, and the brand of van was about as relevant as the brand of saw I was using to chop down the leylandii.
However, the journey back from the hire centre made me focus a bit more on the van than I had intended. First, I had a hard time finding a half-way decent driving position: I'm no giraffe, but this machine seemed to have been designed for someone with stubby legs and huge arms. Then the gearbox drove me mad; like my much-missed old 1980s Peugeot 305, it had a gearlever 20 feet long with huge travel in every dimension and a spring in its mechanism which was so overpowered that I started to keep an eye out for Jeremy Beadle as I missed gears at very opportunity, starting in third, changing up from first to fourth,and learning that I had a much more colourful vocabulary than I knew. As I got back to the house, a friend's call came through on my mobile headset to ask how I was doing, and the answer was simple: fine, except for this hideous, evil van. Bring back the Ford Escort, says I: French (snipped the insult - PU) should stick to making their bad wine and leave the mechanical things to the Japanese. Or the Italians, or anybody other than the French.
I took out the hammer to smash the discarded flatpack furniture, and was tempted to use it on the van, but what with the way our dearly-departed leader has enhanced our liberties, I reckoned that would more likely win me an orange jumpsuit than a replacement van. And orange really washes out my skin tones.
Off to the dump, and after a few more expletives, I figured out the gearshift: floor the gas, then block-shift from first to third. And in doing that, I found that the diesel engine was remarkably flexible, and that even well-laden, this van had a lot of voomf. Even better, it rode like a proper French car, and was remarkably grippy: I could push it through roundabouts a lot faster than my Almera. (Although, to be fair to the Almera, I don't flog my own car the way I flog a hired van).
By the time the dump closed, and I scrubbed myself up to go out for the evening, the choice of wheels was easy: the van. My aged relative said she hadn't been in such a comfortable vehicle for ages, and I found that I actually enjoyed the 15-mile journey each way to a very fine meal.
By the time I returned the van next morning, 150 miles of dump trips after I had picked it up, I was truly sorry to part with it. The cushioned ride and the magic handling made it feel like a sort of expanded Renault 5: quirky and French, flawed by adorable. I recalled how I had toyed with the idea of buying a Berlingo last year, and part of me really regretted not having tried one. This is a vehicle with real charm.
But it has one fatal flaw which made me realise that despite its charms, it would be a bad buy: my knees. No matter how I adjusted the seat and the steering wheel, the best I could do was to move my knees an inch away from the dashboard rather than having then touching it. And this was not a matter of them grazing underneath a sloping underside to the dashboard: they were stuck firmly in front of a wall of very hard plastic. In a crash, it wouldn't matter if the dashboard remained in its place rather than being pushed back; a small bit of movement from me would leave me with smashed kneecaps.
What a pity. In most other respects, the Berlingo is a flawed masterpiece, a testament to the French ability to produce vehicles with great character, machines whose talents in some areas are huge enough to outweigh their deep flaws in others. But in an impact, I fear that this eccentric genius might not be much more of a friend than an IRA knee-capper. I have no idea how Euro NCAP's assessment of the Berlingo at www.euroncap.com/tests/citroen_berlingo_2005/234.a...x gave it adequate-to-marginal results for the driver's knees. Does their test dummy have five-foot-long arms?
|
