I don’t know about you, but whenever I take a family holiday the snapshots always seem to be 50 per cent family having fun and 50 per cent oddball old cars I’ve spotted mouldering away down European alleyways.

Whenever I’m travelling through France I’m generally disappointed not to find the streets full of H vans and 2CVs like the French textbooks I remember from school, but this year’s family jaunt to Languedoc showed promise, much to the wife’s exasperation: instead of bargaining with the man on the cheese stall I was composing a panning shot of the mint DS Safari cruising round the town square and marvelling over the Renault 30 parked at the kerb. Even my seven-year-old son got in on the act, by rather randomly spotting an old Metro down a side street. It’s no Facel Vega but I still bought him a croissant for his observational skills.

Staying on the French theme, this month’s candidate for the Tried & Tested slot is a Citroën GS, the air-cooled, fluid-suspended challenger in the ’70s family saloon market. Looking back, it’s amazing that the firm even tried to sell something so wacky into the notoriously conservative UK market, but a colleague has just looked over my shoulder and pointed out that somewhere there’s a Frenchman wondering why we ever tried to flog them the Hydragas-suspended Princess in return.

Back home again, it doesn’t get any more British than Aston Martin and Jaguar, both of which feature prominently this month and the XJS v XK8 question had us all sitting on the fence: the XK will undoubtedly become a classic but the XJS is timeless and in many ways the early cars which looked slightly gawky at the time now seem to have aged more gracefully than the later examples. You’ll read our eventual verdict on page 40 and what’s the betting that next time we cover the replica car market, someone will be making an XJS replica based on an XK8?

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For all this and much more see the October 2011 issue of Classic Car Mart.