PHOTOGRAPHY
JONNY FLEETWOOD
IT took a surprising amount of sniffing around until I managed to find a dusty old Renault 5 and wedge our shiny green machine alongside for a family photo. And this was the south of France where the climate is kind to old bangers, even ones that ended production three decades ago. Only a very few years ago it would have been easy. Most villages had a one man band garage with a petrol pump and dark messy service bay, its walls covered with rusting enamel signs: Cibié, Kléber, Yacco. Round the back you’d glimpse semi-abandoned Renaults and Peugeots, the more senior of them with the telltale yellow headlights. That, in my mind’s eye, was to have been our ideal photo location. If Renault’s hype machine wants us to recall the original 5, very well, we’d do it with an elegantly shabby example, scrapyard dog in the background yanking ominously at its chain.