Imagine the futility of car spotting these days.
A thing that occurred recently to me was the type of hobbies we used to have. In my early teenage years, many of my friends were into train spotting – collecting steam train numbers – and would go some distances to spot them, crossing them off into little books published for the purpose. In our earlier years, we used to car spot. We’d stand on the side of the Broadway writing down car numbers in a small book we kept; registrations mainly finishing in FT or TN. This must have been pre ’63 or so when they came up with suffix letters. We would try to get a complete run of say AFT 1 through 999. I remember AFT1, BFT1, CFT1 and so on were all police cars. By ’63, they had got to JFT / KFT or so. Imagine the futility of car spotting these days. In fact it was fairly futile then, but possible.