I never knew it, but apparently I’m sick. ‘Sick’, that is, as in ‘down with the kids’, ‘happening’ or ‘groovy’, not chronically poorly. Well, perhaps not groovy, as the word itself derives from a different era, but whichever way you look at it, Big Mike is alot cooler than he ever could have imagined. Why’s that? Simple. Because I’m ‘retro’. And retro, as far as any marketing type will tell you, is a Very Good Thing.

Clothing labels, record companies, furniture stores, you name it – retro is the way to go. That is, boldly, but where lots of people have gone before.

This age of retro-cool suits me down to the ground. As regular readers of this column may have noticed, I have an incurable fondness for vehicles of a certain era – mainly late seventies through to the mid to late eighties, when I could realistically get away with the nickname Medium Mike, and when I had youth and energy on my side. Nobody with a Black Country accent could ever quite pull off being a yuppie properly (at least not once they’d opened their mouths) but I came as close as a Wolverhampton boy could get, red braces and all.

It was inevitable, then, that when I heard of a lovely – and I mean really, really lovely – 1986 BMW 320i going begging, finished in Rick Astley whiter-than-White, I had no option but to do a deal. Like all good car dealers, I ignored every rule the consumer magazines and price guides suggest, and bought it blind, over the internet. Let it be my fault, then, that the fuel gauge doesn’t work and it hunts for revs on idle…

Even so, it was well worth the paltry Monkey-and-a-bit I coughed up for it, as I hope the photo illustrates (yes, Big Mike has a digital image capturing device too). When was the last time you saw one of these in such condition? Even more fabulous was the ultimate confirmation that I was a cool dude, which came when I went to pick the car up.

No doubt some of you upper class dealers are rolling your eyes in bewilderment at this point, but here at the down-and-dirty end of the motor trade it’s not uncommon to spend half your week on the railways, chasing down bargain stock. And so it was that I rolled into the railway station in Ipswich (I blame eBay, and its wonderfully optimistic proximity references to your postcode) on a bright and chilly morning to meet the bloke who was selling it.

It’s funny how you imagine what a person looks like when you talk to them over the phone, and prior to collecting the beefy Beemer I’d had a chat with the seller, Nick, a couple of times on the phone. He was polite, articulate, very genuine sounding and generally a nice bloke (I put the fuel gauge not working down to an oversight). I imagined both from his name and the timbre of his voice that Nick would be in his forties, and the kind of bloke to wear jeans and a golf jumper.

‘For a moment, I thought I was lost in an episode of Life on Mars…’

So when the BMW pulled up at the station, sun gleaming off its icy white panels, I was amazed when Limahl stepped out of it. Wedge-shaped haircut, drainpipe trousers, narrow tie, beefed up jacket shoulders and a pair of spectacles that, at one time, you could only have got through the NHS. If ever there was anyone to find behind the wheel of an eighties BMW, this guy was it. Indeed, the only reason he was selling it was because he’d acquired a red Porsche 944.

Nick, it turned out, was a salesman in his mid 20s, immaculately groomed and really quite handsome, though I say as much in a manly, firm-wristed kind of way. You know, a David Beckham type. The kind of bloke you aspire to be, rather than that you fancy… or maybe you don’t. Grooming aside, he was also pure comedy.

For a moment, I thought I was lost in an episode of Life on Mars as he reached inside his jacket pocket and pulled out the biggest mobile phone you’ve ever seen, to bell his boyfriend for a lift home (at which point I lost all my aspirations). I enquired about said object, from the days when a phone was a phone and not a ‘personal communicator’, as it proclaims on the owners manual of my own latest widget.

Apparently, Nick ran a sideline in buying old Eighties mobiles from car boot sales and re-equipping them with the innards of modern ones, so they can take pictures and receive emails, but still look like something from decades ago. Which, he assured me, was very cool indeed. On the basis that I can take pictures, send emails and look like something from roughly the same era, that makes me the definition of cool too, doesn’t it? Especially with my Beemer!

Who is Big Mike?

Well, that would be telling. What we do know is he’s had more than 30 years experience in the car trade and picked up some seriously funny  tales along the way. You can read more Big Mike here