The Hare and the Duster COUNTRY SQUIRE MAGAZINE

Listen to this article

BY DOMINIC WIGHTMAN

In the rolling paddocks of motoring, where sleek German thoroughbreds once pranced and pretentious 4x4s posed, there now stands a singular monument to humble triumph. It is not polished (except by downpours). It smells vaguely of hawk and less vaguely of fart. It is ex-gamekeeper turned falconer and CSM columnist, Gary Baxter’s Dacia Duster, which has just lolloped, unburdened by vanity, past the 213,000-mile mark (evidence below) despite mimicking landfill in its filthy footwells.

Consider, if you will, the modern motorist. He who signed away his pension for a Mercedes, a vehicle so suffused with electronic sensitivity it greets him with a mournful sigh if he’s had a hearty lunch. Or she who chose the Mitsubishi Outlander, a spaceship of cup-holders and hybrid sensors, which now resides on a forecourt, its battery as lifeless as a doornail, its spirit broken by a school run to Bicester.

These presentable chariots have gone to the great scrapyard in the sky years ago, their owners left with nothing but a logbook and a lingering smell of jealousy at Baxter’s cheap mount.

Gary is the boastful type. He admits he’s not the lightest fellow and possesses the build of a neanderthal (should the local museum in Northampton ever need a quick reference model for ‘Homo Sapiens Robustus’). His Duster is less a car, more a mobile ecosystem. It is an avian transit lounge, a repository for feathers, feed, and the ghostly whispers of a thousand dispatched rodents. On its roof sits a tent, I kid you not, pitched with the structural elegance of a badger’s sett, from which his sonorous snoring emanates at dawn—a foghorn call to the countryside that Gary has, once again, successfully defended from the most vicious of moles.

Gary’s Duster doesn’t drive; it progresses, with the determined, unstoppable gait of a hibernatory bear. It bears its dents as medals: the scrape from a recalcitrant hedgerow, the dent from an over-enthusiastic saboteur, the patina of mud from every field in the county. While the heated seats of a Range Rover offer a gentle lumbar massage, Gary’s seats offer a more primal support, moulded perfectly to a form that suggests he could, in a pinch, shoulder-open a bank vault.

This is not a vehicle pampered with ‘detailing’. A quick blast with a pressure washer is considered an invasive spa day, and likely disturbs several families of spiders who are vital for morale. The engine, a simple, un-vexed thing, turns over each morning with the cheerful reliability of a labrador, utterly unaware that its peers from 2012 have long since been melted down into toasters.

So, who is having the last laugh? It is the man who, while others queued at charging stations or winced at a four-figure bill for a new ‘infotainment system’, was simply throwing another dead crow in the footwell and heading off to earn a crust. The Duster’s philosophy is Baxter’s own: function utterly eclipses form. It is a tool, a companion, a snoring platform, and a testament to the glorious, un-killable utility that modern motoring tried so hard to breed out.

There is a hare on the Baxter family crest—a symbol of speed and elusive grace. The irony is thick enough to plough. For in Aesop’s tale, the flashy hare lost by being fragile and complacent. The sturdy, plodding tortoise won through relentless endurance. Gary’s Duster is, therefore, the ultimate tortoise. And all those glossy, over-complicated, now-deceased status symbols? They were the hares, who sprinted ahead in a blaze of showroom glory, only to nap permanently by the roadside with a catastrophic gearbox failure.

So, raise a glass of something sensible to Gary and his indomitable Duster this new year. It is a win for the pragmatists, a victory for the un-pampered, and a deafening, rattling, feather-filled raspberry to the cult of the new car. It’s not about the miles per gallon, Dear Readers. It’s about the stories per mile. And this one’s epic has 213,000 chapters, and counting. Just don’t get too close if the farting starts—it’s known to have disabled a fox den after a Full English at Morrisons.

Dominic Wightman is the Editor of Country Squire Magazine, works in finance, and is the author of five and a half books including Conservatism (2024).