After working eight or nine hours at the bank, Dave Fisher liked nothing more than coming home, going into his garage, and “tinkering” around with his car.
That was why he wanted to buy a classic car, something older, that he could do just that with.
“I’ve had brand new cars but they were so boring because I had to wait for the warranty to run out before I could start pulling them to bits,” Dave, 57, of Westhill, said.
“Given a screwdriver and a spanner, there was very little on an older car that you couldn’t fix yourself.
“You’ll know fine well now that if you lift the bonnet of your car you’ve probably got a sheet of plastic. I wouldn’t even know where to start with a modern car.
“I came up to Aberdeenshire about 25 years ago with the Halifax bank and I really wanted something that was older I could just tinker about with.
“I had a series of Volkswagens, three or four-year-old Golfs, and I just wanted something that was a little bit older that I could have a lot of fun with even though it would never go very far very fast.”
After having a chat with a neighbour and joining the Scotland North East Morris Minor Club, he decided that was the car for him.
“I was keen on the idea of getting a Morris because the odd ones that I saw, I thought I could do that, I could fix that so I went to see this man in about 1998 and he told me the things to look out for.
“If it hadn’t been a Morris Minor, it would have been an early Volkswagen Beetle. I’ve always liked the style because the two were launched within about five years of each other.
“There are a lot of similarities. There’s just a nice rounded shape and they were as cheap as chips. They are not any more.”
His first experience of being in a Morris was not in the driving seat but as a passenger in his neighbour’s car.
He said: “It just seemed like good fun, it was very basic. It reminded me of the first Ford Escort that came out that my driving instructor had when I was 17 which was about 1974. It was just a very simple car, nothing that you couldn’t fix yourself.”
Dave, who now works as a sales advisor for GPH Builders Merchants, which has branches in Inverurie and Westhill, found his first Morris Minor in a classic car magazine and bought it in 1998 in Cambridgeshire.
That was a 1961 four-door saloon and since then he has also owned a 1959 two-door saloon, a 1967 Traveller and his most recent Morris is a 1955 four-door saloon.
His Traveller was a particular favourite of his wife.
He added: “That if anything was my wife’s favourite because you had a panoramic view out of a very big window in the back. She loved it when we went to Orkney in that.
“I actually swapped that one. The man who wanted the Traveller had the one that I’ve now got so we just swapped.
“Unfortunately he later discovered that it wasn’t what he wanted and the last time I saw it was in a filling station in Inverurie where a couple from the west coast of America had come over here to tour Scotland. They’d bought it and were shipping it back by the Panama Canal to America for total restoration.”
The Morris Minors have become a bit of a family affair in the Fisher household with Dave’s son also learning to drive in one of them.
Dave said: “What he liked about it was you could hear everything that was going on. When his instructor took him out in a modern car, he kept stalling because he couldn’t hear anything.”
He’s now had his latest Morris Minor for nearly six years and his previous cars have taken him on some interesting journeys – the most interesting being the length of the country from John O’ Groats to Lands End with the national Morris Minor Club.
Although his current car only manages a top speed of 55mph, Dave said he doesn’t mind as his Morris’s have always been recreational cars and you “see a lot of the country that you don’t see when you are doing 70mph”.
And it’s the social side of the car that Dave also likes – being the secretary of the Scottish division for the North-East Morris Minor Club for the past seven years.
“I just like being around people with a common interest,” he explained.
“We have a member who is 100 years old and we have another who is a 22-year-old girl from Ellon so it’s very mixed.
“I don’t think there are two people who have the same profession either. It’s just a great diversity, we don’t talk shop about our day jobs.
“It’s a real broad range of people. It’s just a good fun club to be in.”
Dave also enjoys going to the vintage gatherings. But getting to the shows is just as enjoyable for Dave as the events themselves.
He said: “There is a good one at Grantown. I always go up the Lecht and people always say ‘oh you couldn’t have gone up the Lecht’ and I just say ‘absolutely’. I sometimes wind them up and say ‘The last bit I had to do in reverse’.
“I’ve been up and down Glenshee in it as well so I enjoy the drive as much as when I get there.”
This summer Dave took a holiday down to Northumberland where the car attracted lots of attention.
He added: “I was going to start counting how many people came up to me and said I used to have one of those and to be honest after three days I lost count. I couldn’t pull up anywhere without someone coming up to me.”
So after four cars in the past 15 years does Dave think he has found his final Morris Minor?
“Oh lord, no,” he said. “I definitely see myself with another one, I just don’t know when yet.”