DM turned to me and grinned while he was driving us to the Liskeard Steam and Vintage Rally at Boconnoc today and said ‘every time you go out in the beetle, it’s an adventure!’ An adventure it certainly was today.

Arriving at the rally in convoy with Iain and Becks, we were pulled up by a steward and asked if we wanted to put ‘the little car’ into the classic car ring, even though we’d arrived late in the day. Well, as they say, is a shark’s arse watertight? You bet it is and you bet we did. So, grin widening by the second, the Lurker growled its way down the hill and into the show ring.

Amazingly it was the only beetle in the display and was soon attracting attention. The grin widened a bit more. There were some extremely good cars on display, including a Morris Isis – I’ve never even heard of the Isis before. Not one Vauxhall PA, neither a Cresta nor a Velox in sight – shame. There were cool displays of Angle-boxes, Zodiacs and A30s though. Even my old pal, Peter Greengrow was there!

One of the best things in the show, we were not even sure of what we'd seen until we were able to go home and check. We saw a trailer, loaded with chunks of granite and thought to ourselves 'we recognise that trailer....and that granite'. Yep - it was the very trailer from our own quarry, where we'd been studying those very pieces of granite last weekend, to see how slowly they'd cooled! We were 99% sure but we had to walk up the hillside tonight with the dogs to check - it was also a good excuse to give Arch a swim!

We’d wandered around the fair, looking at traction engines, old motorbikes and tractors when I got separated from David. Becks, Iain and the boys were waiting by the entrance to say ‘cheerio’ – poor little Gregor is teething and feeling very fed-up so they’d decided it was time to call it a day. I ambled over to them, waited for David then looked up the field, across the masses of steam and smoke of the engines to see a sight that I will never forget. DM climbing up onto the drivers platform (I have no idea what you call it.)

‘Hold this wheel’ the man said to David. He reached up to hold it and the man said ‘no, get up and hold it’. So he did. The owner of the engine grabbed his camera and put it into his cubby-hole in the canopy of the beast. After a quick wave to me, DM steered this beautiful great beast past my flabbergasted stare and into the show ring, doing a couple of laps in double quick time.

Yikes – he’s got no knowledge of how to ‘drive’ one of these things. He tried to steer like a car and the man (John Wakeham we assume) said ‘no, not like that, take the handle and turn madly’. He did. Into the ring they went, full steam ahead. Then the fun started.

A race up the hill and a daring overtake manoeuvre were part of the day’s proceedings. I shot as many pics of him as I could, while trying to stop myself from being positively GREEN with envy.

He climbed down, covered in black grease, had a short discussion with the owner then returned to me.

He was grinning from ear to ear! He certainly got his adventure from a trip in the Lurker today.

Last year, I was photographing a pink toothbrush.