As to the cycling: This is something that Nessa enjoyed as far back as I can remember but during the 1990s there was a bit of a cycling "boom" fueled by the new found popularity of mountain bike sales. The whole family became more interested and that's when the tandem thing began.  Nessa reminded me recently that she'd enjoyed "stoking" a tandem with me on the front but that it had become a bit of a wobbly train wreck with Gary.... you'll probably need to ask him about that one!  I can't remember much about her bike in those days except that she was a bit disappointed with it.  She went out from here on a rainy day once and borrowed my very posh breathable waterproof cycling coat... it came back with half the Herefordshire countryside up the back of it which might help to explain why the replacement bike I built for her after that (which Liv now has) is fitted with mudguards!

Growing up with vintage cars sounds like a really cool thing to do these  days but in the 1970s it was very very eccentric. Our mum drove a 1930 Alvis 1250 and nothing else. It was open top and for years she wouldn't let Peter fit a hood to it to protect against the rain. Even after he had persuaded her to have the hood fitted she used to take a pride in leaving it down rain, cold, or shine.  My main memories of Nessa's experiences with the car involve much coldness, some soakings and some shivering. As we grew up and became adults it later surprised me to find out how many fond memories she had of the whole old car thing: it was after all a huge part of our family life and socialising. We all had a particular fondness for Dudley and Joyce Johns who lived locally and not having children of their own used to dote on us. Dudley and Joyce bought many of the cars which had been used to film "Monte Carlo or Bust" with Tony Curtis et al. We got to ride in some of these and it all felt rather glamorous that we were in the cars of the stars. She always had a great fondness for the film as a result.  Nessa flew the flag for "character vehicle ownership" herself when she became the very proud owner of the gold VW Beetle 1303 - a car she loved. Later in life the beloved Beetle gave way to a Skoda Estelle. The skills which she must have acquired dealing with the Chitty Chitty Bang Bang jokes must have equipped her well for the Skoda days and there wasn't a Skoda joke she didn't know. 

Bonny Lass was indeed, (as mental horses go) fairly loopy. I was quite young at the time but I think that it must have been quite stressful for Nessa shouldering responsibility for an equine psychopath whose joy in escaping from captivity was seconded only by the joy of throwing its rider into the air.  We had some surprisingly good family moments "battling the adversity" including most of one Christmas day re-fencing the field.  Nessa was always intrepid when it came to loopy horses and I could fill the page with anecdotes about falls and incidents. I once watched her flying through the air still in a sitting position as though she was still on the horse. When I managed to lift her out of the hedge in which she had landed I was very relieved to discover that she was unscathed.

The dance thing was one of those "right things at the right time" enthusiasms and just as we became interested in it so did everyone else around the area and there was an amazing social scene going.  One evening after a Jive class in Malvern, Nessa wanted a bit of a heart to heart chat about some stuff which was on her mind and we sat together in my car which was parked up in the car park of what used to be the RSRE social club. There was quite a lot to talk about as it happened and when we had finished we discovered that the parking compound had been locked up with us and our car still inside the wire mesh fencing. It was not easy to escape. The fencing looked like it had been designed for Colditz or something and we were well and truly locked in for the evening.  I told Nessa about a short story from one of my favourite authors: Alasdair Gray. The story was about cartoon characters who get trapped and paint an exit on the wall which they then walk through; it made the analogy of how we "paint ourselves exits" in real life and I told Nessa that's what we'd have to do.  We succeeded and found a gap underneath the fencing somewhere under which we rolled before a midnight walk back to Macaulay Rise.  For years afterwards "painting an exit" became a phrase between us.