ORIGINAL OF THE SPECIES

One of the great ‘advances’ of this social-media-driven world has been the democratisation of hyperbole. Once largely the preserve of politicians, journalists and advertising copywriters, such lexical exaggeration has become a free-for-all… and inevitably diluted as a result. ‘Iconic’ now roughly equates to ‘quite good’, ‘legendary’ to ‘you might have heard of him/her/it’, and ‘national treasure’ to anyone who is generally presumed to be liked but is wholly inadequate in their chosen publicfacing profession. There’s even an equivalent in our cosy little world: has any word suffered more than ‘barnfind’?

We are all to blame, of course, not least the hacks, dealers and auction houses, but what started as a valid romantic description for that stashed California Spyder discovered in and dragged out of the remote barn where it had been hidden from the world half a century ago, is now equally applied to a dusty Mk3 Escort that has been in a lock-up for four months since the MoT expired. That’s progress, but it’s a bit of a pain when there is a genuine barnfind.

And that’s what we have here, just to prove that they really do still happen. It is a 1934 Aston Martin MkII, which, because of its astonishing originality, not only offers us a near-unique insight into what these cars were like in period, but also is one of the earliest virtually