We all have a favourite car. Perhaps it was the first one you ever owned. Maybe it was the dream car you saved up for for years. It might have been the car you proposed in - or the car in which you made an unforgettable road trip.

We're launching a great new weekly feature - My Car and Me - in which we want you to tell us about your favourite car - and why it is so special to you.

You can send us details about your car (and photos!) by clicking here

Meanwhile, Press writer Stephen Lewis tells about his first-ever car to get you started...

 

My car and me

Neddy was a clapped-out old Mini Clubman (in the days when Minis were actually small) with a dodgy exhaust, a gearstick longer than my arm and a red-and-white paint job (red body, white roof) that made him look like a lollipop.

His licence plate began with the letters NDD (hence the name) and he was probably older than me (I was 17 at the time). But he was my first car and I loved him.

My brother's schoolmate once took his engine apart on my parents' front drive, just to see how he worked, and never quite managed to put him back together properly. After that he always sounded a bit hoarse. He drank oil like nobody's business, emitted the occasional cloud of blue fumes, and had a tendency to lose power at vital moments. Plus the ride was terrible. He rattled and shook, and you felt every bump in the road.

But he was beautiful - or at least I thought so.

On one long summer, after I had finished my A-levels, I took him on a driving tour of the Scottish highlands. I had a sleeping bag in the back (it was cramped) and for a couple of glorious weeks he was both home and travelling companion.

We explored Glen Coe together, headed up deep into the northern highlands, and generally did everything we could to get off the beaten track.

And then I noticed, on the ancient OS map I was using, an old road that led out to a lake with an island in the middle. It was irresistible.

Neddy and I turned onto it. It wasn't a road so much as a dry river bed. We bounced and jolted along it, Neddy scraping across builders and plunging into gaping holes. Eventually, we reached the lake and its island. It was in the middle of nowhere, silent and eerie. Evening was approaching - the air had that quietness you get in the far north when the sun thinks it should be setting but hasn't quite got around to it. The loneliness pressed in, and suddenly I was spooked.

I turned Neddy around and we belted out of there as fast as we could. Neddy was rattled and shaken and banged as we raced along that river bed of a track, juddering from rock to rock.

He somehow made it back to the main road - and even got me home to my parents. A miracle. But he was never the same again, and eventually had to be retired to that scrapyard in the sky.

It was so long ago that I don't even have a photo of him - the picture used here is just one I found on the internet, though it's him to a T in his final days. But I've never forgotten Neddy. My first car, and my best...