The Times
Jerome Starkey in Kabul

It’s pure pleasure driving my Beetle around Kabul.

Originally painted in VW’s Toga White with a crank-operated sunroof and factory fitted with a then state-of-the-art Emden radio, she rolled off the production line in Germany on October 28, 1968 but exactly how she came to Afghanistan remains a mystery.

By the time we met, two years ago, the Gala red “permeable plastic” upholstery had long since gone and “toga white” had been locally translated to “shitouri,” which means camel-coloured, in Dari. I renamed her Herb-i-Islami.

Archivists in Wolfsburg said the record of who bought her is “unreadable,” but the Afghan papers have survived.

She was owned by an Afghan woman called Hassina Jan, during Kabul’s 1970s heyday. I like to think that she was driven here, via Iran, by hippies retracing the old silk road, before war and politics made these places impassable.

Then she was sold, or abandoned, in a haze of marijuana smoke when the lovers ran out of money. One day, I will drive her back.

I bought her for £450 in 2010, and it costs about £100 a month — in begrudging instalments to the mechanic Ahmad Zia Faqiri — to keep her running.

When I asked Mr Faqiri (who I have come to know almost better than the car) to fix the sunroof he welded it shut.

Yet I watch in awe as he taps and tinkers and sniffs and listens to diagnose her never-ending ailments, and he has taught me to blow dust out of the distributor cap and suck dirt (and fuel) out of the carburettor to keep her on the road.