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Last week I wrote a Back Box column on the subject of breakdowns and quibbled about whether a car with mechanical problems, but that never fails to get you home, is unreliable or not. Well, I have now suffered a definite, no-contest, indisputable breakdown. Fortunately (or not) it didn’t occur in one of my own cars. I spent last weekend visiting my family on the South Coast and was lucky enough to be able to leave the (faultless) Citroën 2CV down there and drive my Dad’s 1960 Austin Seven Mini back to Peterborough,with the intention of taking it to the inaugural Peterborough Classic Vehicle Show, which takes place this weekend. A 54-year old 848cc Mini may not be everyone’s first choice for a 150-mile trip but I’ve done longer journeys than that in the Mini and it is utterly dependable. You can see where this is going… I’ll doubtless tell the full story in a future Staff Classics update, but my journey was cut short in the car park of the Stevenage Novotel at around 11pm with a large bank of steam rolling out of the Mini’s bonnet. I didn’t make it back to Peterborough until 1.30am in the morning, with the Mini on the back of a low-loader. As I write this I haven’t stripped it down to find out what’s wrong with it, but it seems fairly certain that the head gasket has gone between a cylinder and a waterway and simply boiled off all the water – the cooling system is virtually empty but there’s no ‘mayonaisse’ in the rocker cover or in the sump. Aside from the delicious irony that I swapped my 2CV, which was deliberately designed without a water circuit, a radiator or even head gaskets because they were considered too unreliable, for a car which immediately suffered gasket failure and water loss, the experience has also been an excellent example of how easy classic ownership can be if you pick a mechanically simple car with good parts support.