A man has been reunited with his late grandmother's Mini, after it turned up in a garage in Norfolk 25 years after he last set eyes on it.
Daniel Fox, 36, said it was 'miraculous' the vehicle had survived all this time, and that he had stumbled across it while shopping online.
At the weekend, he travelled from his home in Cambridgeshire to pick up the car from the Smallburgh couple who had kept the red Mini off-road for two decades.
Hooked by the Mini bug, after being driven in his nan Joan's as a boy, Mr Fox has owned a number of the cars and had been looking to buy another.
He said: 'When I saw it I thought it looked like nan's, but I could only see part of the number plate. The steering wheel ended up being the thing which sealed it.'
When Mr Fox's nan died in 1990, his sister Andrea inherited the Mini, but ended up part-exchanging it in 1994. And it was a change she made which confirmed Mr Fox's suspicions.
He said: 'My sister had never got on with the original steering wheel, so she'd replaced it and, when I spoke to the chap on the phone and he described it, that confirmed it for me.
'I knew I had to have it. It's miraculous, really, that it survived all this time, almost exactly as it came out of the factory.
'It took three of us to push it out of the garage and winch it on to the truck to bring it back to my home.'
Radio presenter Mr Fox, who lives in Great Gransden, said he had paid 'a lot' for the car, but now faces spending more to get it back on the road.
While delighted to have his nan's Mini, which has 58,000 miles on the clock, back, Mr Fox said: 'It's a lovely story, but now I can't let it deteriorate on my watch. I have to fix it.
'I asked my mum what nan would have made of it all and she said that she would have loved it, loved all the fuss being made over her car.'
And Mr Fox was clearly not the only person besotted with the 35-year-old Mini.
'The man was selling it because he was moving to a house which didn't have a garage,' Mr Fox said. 'But he'd moved twice before and on both occasions he'd taken the Mini with him, even though it wasn't on the road.
'They are brilliant cars,' he added. 'I have always liked them. They are just so idiosyncratic.'
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