Beauty in the eye of the beholder

I've been messing about with a Munga Jeep today, preparing it for its forthcoming MoT test. I rewired the lights, and fixed the petrol gauge sender unit. The gameplan is to drive it to Mongolia next summer, so it sort of helps (a) if things work and (b) that you know how to fix them if and when they don't.

I can't really decide if it's beautiful or ugly. You see, it's both. It's boxy and square and very very basic. But actually those are really great virtues... it was built in the 1960s as a general purpose Eastern Bloc military vehicle... so it would get a bit of a battering and some heavy handling from everyday soldiers. It has shackles on it that are there so you can pop a parachute on it and drop it out of a plane. Most chunks of it seem designed so that they can be mended or adjusted with a big hammer and some baler twine (the agricultural equivalent of Gaffer Tape). I do have a huge manual for it, (one in German and one in English), but most things are so obvious I haven't had to consult them.

As it happens, I also recently started running a much more modern Jeep Cherokee. Last week a mysterious warning light came on, on the dashboard. Sorting out precisely what's causing the fault, and whether it's a genuine fault or just a fault of the fault reporting has been a nightmare. I've spent hours tracing cables and checking hoses all of which are incredibly inaccesible, and mostly unmentioned in the manual. A week later and I'm still not much nearer with diagnosing it.

Maybe these sorts of vehicles are like babies. If they are your own and you understand all their idiosyncracies, then they are beautiful. If they are someone else's, then they are ugly and messy and unpredictable and noisy. Objectivity...? Pah...!