TRUE COLOURS

Wind the clock back eight years to 2012. Someone called Gotye, with a little bit of help from a girl from Hamilton called Kimbra, was a music sensation and released a chart-topping song called Somebody That I Used to Know. Sanitarium announced to the country that it was unable to make any more Marmite for the foreseeable future due to damage to the Christchurch factory caused by the previous year’s monster earthquake. New Zealanders collectively chewed their way through 640 tons of the bitter ‘axle-grease-like’ spread every year with their morning coffee, thus coining the term ‘Marmageddon’.

That year also saw the biggest change in the nation’s road rules in 35 years. The boffins in Wellington scrapped the ‘give way to the right’ rule. New Zealanders were dragged kicking and screaming into the real world and adopted the ‘left turn has right of way rule’ just like everybody else who drives on the left side of the road. People lost their minds over it.

More important, 2012 was the year that Tony Middlemiss and the LH Torana you see on these pages met for the very first