54 Oval Beetle

As any old git will know, things just aren't like they used to be. Kids grow up quicker these days, the innocence of youth lost before they've even made it to secondary school, and everyone just seems to have, well, so much more. When I was a lad (cue Hovis advert music), I worked my butt off to save the money to buy my first Beetle. Like Lee Wakeling, the owner of this car here, I bought a late model Bug - in my case a '68, in his a '70 Bug. By the time I was 24 I had completed my first restoration, moved to London and started a career in one of the worst paid industries known to man. But I still had that first Beetle, and I can tell you it was nothing to write home about. Lee, on the other hand, at age 24 also still has his first Beetle, but it's morphed into the car you see here, which makes mine look like what it was - a bit of dung on the sole of my shoe.
But the route to his owning this car has not been without its trials and tribulations. Looking back through his rose-tinted retrospectroscope, Lee admits now that he spent far too much time and effort working on his old '70, only to discover that when the body was shotblasted it was fit for little more than the local landfill site. But having already completed much of the restoration work on the floorpan (new pan halves, plus framehead and lower bulkhead repairs), he decided he was too far into it to simply start again, so got rid of the old body and started looking for something to replace it with.