So winter somehow crept up on me when I wasn't looking and the deteriorating weather started to make the hardtop, which has sat unloved on its stand at the back of the garage since April, look attractive again. I do love the looks of this car with the hardtop on - it's one of the few cars whose hardtop really suits it in my view, and having the hardtop on only highlights the absence of conventional doors if you drive with them open.

Expenditures since the last report have included the annual MoT in October, which it breezed through and which entertainingly cost me merely one Russian beaver-fur hat (the owner of our local village garage was off with his wife to do the London-Brighton run in some 1896 contraption and so she'd asked me to bring her back a proper Russian hat). I also sourced a spare set of original Z1 alloys for the reasonable sum of £250. These were re-furbished for the princely sum of £40 per wheel and shod with a set of new Toyo Snowprox tyres for a further £350 (www.mytyres.com), these being the only winter tyres I could find for a decent price in the unusual size of 225/45/R16 demanded by the OEM alloys.

Despite my earlier assertion that a Z1 can make a surprisingly good sole car, I don't really want to subject it to mundane motoring tasks and occasionally it is useful to have a car with some vague sort of load-lugging space. Therefore I bought the Z a pal. I looked at all sorts of interesting stuff, from a BMW 635CSi Highline to a W124 Merc 500E to an Alfa 156. And then I bought a Saab 9000 2.3 (a.k.a. the Potemkin) for 800 quid from a friend who was getting a new car. Why? Well mostly because it was easy - I knew the car and knew it was a good 'un. Plus it was cheap as the proverbial, ginormous, supremely comfortable and equipped with every gadget under the sun.

But it does mean the Z1 ought to have been liberated into its more accustomed role of cosseted weekend plaything. However, not just yet!
The reason for the perhaps unusual (in England at least) decision to fit winter tyres lay in my holiday plans. Between the 21st December and the 3rd January, the Z and I racked up nearly 4,000kms gallivanting around Europe.

I did think of taking the Potemkin, what with its massively comfy heated seats, cruise control and vast boot, but the charms of the little roadster were too much to resist when I thought of all those glorious Alpine roads and so the Z1 it was, crammed to the gunnels with luggage and skiing-related paraphernalia.
My outward route took me from the freezing fog of Suffolk to crisp sunny Milan, via a stopover in Reims. Left hand drive is definitely a boon at the peages. The car behaved in its usual admirable mile-munching fashion and enthusiastically flew up to an indicated 220kph on a derestricted section of Autobahn between Offenburg and Basle before I remembered that the winter tyres were speed-limited to 130mph and that perhaps discretion was the better part of valour.

I don't know how accurate the speedo is, but the car was still accelerating at the point where I chose to back off. Despite not having the benefit of the aerofoil exhaust (the Lorenz system lacks this feature) to aid downforce, the car felt rock-steady and quite comfortable at a sustained 180-190kph.

After a few days raising second glances from the denizens of Milan over Christmas - manoeuvring something as conspicuous as a foreign-registered Z1 out of my parents' courtyard into the narrow cobbled streets in the heart of Milan's fashion district requires icy sangfroid and total nonchalance as various passing Prada-clad fashionistas eye you from head to toe and wait for you to stall or scrape the wall - I pointed the car north to St. Moritz for a week's skiing, Cresta riding and New Year celebrations with friends. As we all read in the newspapers, the Alps were suffering a slight dearth of snow, so the drive past Lecco and Chiavenna, and up the Maloja pass wasn't difficult, but it was nonetheless great fun with the exhaust note booming off the rockfaces and tunnels, and the freezing temperatures made the roads a touch slippery. The Z then proved quite capable of transporting skis around where necessary (albeit sticking out of an open door) and, avoiding the humourless gaze of the Swiss police, I even managed to get two girls (my cousins) to fit in the passenger seat - disgorging pretty blonde identical twins from a car with sliding doors was an excellent way to stir the enthusiasm of the jaded valet parkers at the nightclub. [your photos of that event are noticeable by their absence, ed]

Given the blizzards which set in with the arrival of the New Year, I considered purchasing snow-chains for my return assault on the Julier Pass en route to Zurich but, as this would involve buying them following what had been a not wholly inexpensive week, I decided to risk depending on the snow tyres alone, since they had so far dealt successfully with getting around town, and even the acid test of the SMTC carpark, whose steep gradient is normally a graveyard for anything with rear wheel drive and/or inadequate grip.

As the pictures show, this could have been a faintly foolhardy decision given the state of the road, but the tyres proved up to the job and, taking care to maintain decent momentum, the Z stormed determinedly up and over the Julier with great rooster-tails of snow kicking up from the rear tyres. Very good fun indeed.

The weather was clear after that (bar nearly drowning in deluges of biblical proportions on the eastern M25) so I managed to make it all the way back to Suffolk that same day, arriving just before midnight to give a total journey time of 15 hours (including Eurotunnel), which isn't bad going for a little old plastic car. This is largely down to the fact that for me the driving position and seats are extremely comfortable making long stints behind the wheel easy going. Plus it's just a fun car to travel in and if I get bored of my iPod selection, I can always switch the stereo off and listen to the glorious noises from the engine, which I am yet to tire of.

It can honestly be said that the car performed immaculately, with only one tail-light losing the will to live on the final leg home from Folkestone, and even that proved just to be a loose bulb rather than a dead bulb. I treated the car to a thorough valet and polish as a reward for its faithful efforts and it now looks its usual pampered self, apparently totally innocent of anything as daft as snowy continental dashes.