Colleen Smith

THIS week I discovered I have owned not one, but two of the world’s best-selling cars.

And while the motor industry the world over faces a drop in sales of nearly 40 per cent over the last year, this particular car is reporting record sales.

The Cozy Coupe sold more than 457,000 units last year (compared to America’s second bestselling car, the Ford F series pickup, which registered barely a third of that number with 143,717).

What’s more, the car is stunningly ugly and only comes in one colour: red with a yellow roof.

And its top speed is only as fast as your little legs can power you (unless you happen to push it down your steeply sloping driveway, as my girls did on many occasions).

My older two had something similar (see pic atttached) which used to spend far too much of the year getting in the way indoors, crashing up and down the hallway. I was glad when they grew too big and I could finally ditch it.

But because of my spectacularly bad family planning, I found myself buying another one 10 years later for my son. Maybe because he didn’t have a little sibling to push around, he never seemed to have quite so many near-fatal adventures (or as much fun) as his big sisters did.

Sales of the Cozy Coupe in the UK have been holding up as well as in the States, with some four million shifted off the shelves since it went into production 30 years ago.

“We’re delighted to be at the top of the UK car sales league table in our 30th anniversary year,” says Ron Brawer, managing director of MGA’s Little Tikes.

“Cozy Coupe delivers on design, fuel consumption, safety and fun.”

In common with today’s trends, the Cozy Coupe also comes ready-pimped in bright pink for Barbie lovers.

TALKING about the upcoming Apollo 11 moon landing 40th anniversary, I’ve come to realise how prevalent the hoax theory is.

Younger generations only remember the awful footage of the Challenger and Columbia space shuttle disasters, killing all 14 crew members.

How can it be possible, they ask, for the technologically-challenged, hippies of the sixties to safely land people on the moon?

I can see why they’d rather believe that the whole thing was stunted up on a Hollywood film set.

Most of the calculations were worked out on chalkboards. The average wrist watch nowadays has more advanced computing technology. And the only thing stopping these men from burning to death was an exciting new wonder product called Teflon (now saving your eggs from sticking to the frying pan).

Yes, it’s incredible. And maybe you had to be there at the time to believe the madness and bravery and of the space race.

The whole thing was based on the childish, competitive, brutish stupidity that was the Cold War. America and Russia took all the world’s resources and intelligence and pointed them in the same direction — for a few crazy years the only thing that seemed to matter was getting to the moon first.

If it was a stunt, it was a very long drawn out one, which lasted throughout most of my childhood.

Between 1961 and 1972 we spent weeks and weeks gathered around little black and white TV sets, or with our ears up against the radio, trying to follow the latest development.

My older brother, like every other boy of his generation, was obsessed with facts and figures about the latest Apollo mission and would bore me endlessly with every detail. He had a wall chart showing where the spacecraft was each day.

And the reason we were mesmerised was that those astronauts knew (and we all knew) that their chances of survival were based on a wing and a prayer. There was no health and safety mentality in those days.

I’m not knocking health and safety: factoring out the imminent threat of death can only be a good thing.

But back then the world was a dangerous place. My father used to have a 1960s green Austin Mini van and we would use it for holidays and family days out.

That meant mum and dad in the front, with the baby safely held on mum’s knee (no seat belts) and us older four kids all bumping around in the back.

On one memorable occasion when my grandmother was over from Ireland, she came too — along with my aunt and my five cousins, and their Corgi dog. That was four adults, 10 children, a dog, and all our picnic stuff for a day at the beach. In a Mini van (when Minis were miniscule — our van was about the same length as a Smart car). Never mind seatbelts, we were squeezed in so tightly that getting enough oxygen was more of a worry.

I think that kind of devil-may-care mentality about safety puts the Apollo missions into context.

The astronauts’ families watched knowing that the chances of them getting back alive were slim.

At take-off, the world held its collective breath. We knew that at every docking procedure things could go fatally wrong. And when we saw Neil Armstrong walking on the moon, everybody was well aware that these might be the last pictures of him alive.

It was that raw bravery and spirit of adventure that made every little boy want to be an astronaut.

And there’s another factor that moon landing doubters don’t take into account.

Our modern-day reliance on computers is actually a reason why space missions became more dangerous, rather than less.

Those nerdy-looking Houston boys had to rely on old-fashioned brain power and an obsessive, compulsive attention to detail, checking and double-checking every calculation, testing and re-testing every piece of equipment, rehearsing every moment of the mission until everybody knew their part, however small, and everything ran like clockwork. That precision is something that’s been lost.

Computers make complicated calculations so quickly that it is difficult to imagine mathematical theorists and scientists taking years with chalk and blackboards, using pen and paper to do the same job.

Everybody knew that lives would be jeopardised by even the tiniest human error. So it wasn’t allowed to happen. And computer error wasn’t even born.

They say if you remember the sixties you weren’t there. But if you were a child in the sixties, the one thing you remember above all else was the day man landed on the moon. If you don’t believe it happened, perhaps you had to be there.

TODAY is my 26th wedding anniversary.

Or it would have been, if it wasn’t for the small detail of a divorce.

I know. You’re all shouting ‘Get over it’ at me. But it’s OK. I am over it. In fact I was so over it last year I wanted to organise a Not My Silver Wedding Anniversary But Why Not Have a Party Anyway Party. And would have. But it was a Wednesday.

No, the reason I mention my very happy non-anniversary is ‘Poor Guy’.

In case you missed this Tuesday’s paper, let me explain. My colleagues this week played a dirty rotten trick on fellow columnist, poor Guy Henderson, by waiting until he’d left the office and doctoring his weekly page.

The week before was Poor Guy’s silver wedding — a real one (he’s still married, to the same wife, and everything!) — and he’d written in his usual funny, self-deprecatory style about how awful he’d looked in the wedding photos with his big 80s haircut and moustache.

He also claimed the pictures had been lost forever.

But that’s the problem with writing a confessional column. You have to be scrupulously honest.

I think what Guy meant to say was ‘I wish they had been lost forever’. And having now seen the offending pic, I can see why.

He looked like a cross between a bent copper in Life on Mars and one of the Village People.

So of course, certain evil (male) colleagues and family members did everything in their power to unearth one of the offending photos and, in the true spirit of journalism, publish it for the world to see.

As a fellow columnist, who identifies with the perils of baring your life and soul weekly, my sympathies are all with Poor Guy, who is now plotting his rightful revenge.

And as today, June 11, would also have been my anniversary, I thought I’d dig up my wedding photos before anybody else does.

One of my main memories of my wedding day was how much I hated my hair (silly really, when you compare it to Guy’s).

The problem was that a friend, who was a hairdresser, had kindly offered to do my hair for free.

She curled it and lacquered it hard like a helmet and stuck on the silly head-dress thingy. I felt like a Lady Di impersonator (I have just been told that the French call her Lah-di-Dee, which is great and how I shall pronounce it from now on).

But this was an hour before my wedding and too late to change the horrible, not-me hairdo. So I politely thanked her. I was a sweet, well brought up young lady in those days.

What I really wanted to do was burst into tears and rip out her eyes, screaming that she had ruined my special day.

I want to say that as I’m all grown-up and in touch with my emotions and trained in the art of self-assertiveness, things would be different nowadays.

But I know that really I’d still smile and say nothing.

The thing which strikes me most, looking back at those photographs and the memories they bring back, was how terribly sensible I was then.

Nowadays I tend to think of myself as a bit of a dipstick. And most people seem to agree.

Yet I had decided at the age of 23 that it was a good time to buy property. And because of that I decided it was also a good time to get married (not exactly romantic, but we’d already been together for seven years by then, so I kind of thought I might as well get on with it).

I was right about the property (if not the marriage bit). We bought a three-bed semi for £27,500 and sold it three years later, after a few licks of paint and with new central heating, for just under £60,000.

Long before I was 30, I (well we, strictly speaking) owned a detached house at Maidencombe with a third of an acre and a little orchard.

Nowadays your average 23-year-old is more likely to have a £25,000 student loan and overdraft than a mortgage and their own home.

And one of the reasons for the bad hair day on June 11, 1983, was that I was determined to do the big church white wedding thing (off-white — not brilliant, virginal-white, obviously) on a small budget.

Almost everything was home-made or donated (dresses, cake, photos, car, hair). And students did the catering at a big old house which we rented on Dartmoor for the day.

Coincidentally, the same house — Colehayes Park, at Bovey Tracey — was in the news last year when more than 2,000 teenagers turned up there after a teenager advertised her party on Facebook. And even more coincidentally, one of my own children was among the fancy dress partygoers.

And even more coincidentally, the photographer was a young Herald Express trainee called Martin Keene, who left us to go off and work for the Press Association, where he spent a good part of the next few years trailing around after Lady Di (or Lah-di Dee, as she’s now known).

Now looking back at the wedding photos I realised my hair wasn’t so bad after all (although it looks more normal in the going-away pics, after I’d brushed all the lacquer out).

And what also strikes me about this photo is how devilishly handsome my father looked. I’ve worked out he would have been almost exactly the age I am now when he gave me away.

I remember just as he and I got into the wedding car, a little girl passing in the street made my day when she grabbed her mummy’s hand, pointed at me and said, ‘Look — it’s a real princess like Lady Di’ (Lah-di Dee).

I eventually cut up my wedding dress and made two identical little party dresses for my daughters, complete with matching blue sailor collars and sashes.

The girls were about six and four, but when I tried to dress them for a Christmas party, my eldest daughter steadfastly refused to wear hers.

I was going to say she had a tantrum over it, but that would be a lie.

I had a tantrum over it. The dresses had taken me weeks and weeks to make. I had cut up and sacrificed all the John Lewis silk taffeta in my beautiful Lady Di (Lah-di Dee) wedding dress to make them.

For once I decided I was not going to back down. We had such a horrendous, stand-off, screaming match that both of us still remember almost every word 15 years later. I’m sure that everybody who lived in Maidencombe at the time still remembers it.

She tells me now that when we got to the party she went straight to the toilets with all her friends and they all stood and looked at the offending dress and agreed it was disgusting.

It took me a long time to learn, but eventually I realised that it’s not worth fighting with kids about what they wear.

For one thing, they may turn out to be right about our dodgy fashion sense — as anybody looking back at photos of themselves from the 70s and 80s now knows!