Me and Cars

We bought me a new second hand car yesterday. I really, really don’t like the whole process of car buying. Not one little bit. It doesn’t get me excited it fills me with a mild despair. It did get me thinking about other cars I’ve owned and driven though.

The only car I’ve ever been excited about getting was my first car. My Dad found it for me, it was a light brown Vauxhall Chevette, a proper old banger. Dad said it would get me safely through my first year or two of driving and it wouldn’t matter if I bumped it or scratched it because it wouldn’t get through more than 2 MOT’s anyway. I really loved that car, it cost me 200 quid and was worth every penny. I travelled up and down and around the M25/M20/M2/M4 as well as the local roads. I did bump it a few times – reversed into someone’s garden wall instead of their drive once.

I had a red hatchback Vauxhall Nova (I think that’s what it was) at one point. I drove into someone’s rear passenger door in the car park at Buckland Hospital in Dover in that car. In my defence there was a great big hedge that completely obscured the view to my right.

Mike’s Mini Cooper was another car I used to drive a lot. That was a fun car except for when it rained. I remember coming home from a late shift one day. It was pitch black and there was a fierce thunderstorm raging. Naturally the Mini conked out because it’s spark plugs got wet. I managed to stop someone who has to rank as one of the most gallant men I have ever met because in the middle of this ghastly storm he got out of his car, attached the tow rope to my car and towed me to the nearest pub where I could use a phone to call the AA (this was before mobile phones). The AA man arrived and had to follow me all the rest of the way home restarting my car every time it stopped again. I think it stopped another 4 times so he is probably the second most gallant man I’ve met because even though he got wet more than the first stranger he was at least getting paid for getting wet. We always had a can of WD40 in the Mini after that night to spray on the spark plugs in wet weather.

I had a large green car as well, I just remember it being a very long car, don’t know what make it was. I was driving that down a street in Ramsgate when smoke started pouring out from around the foot pedals and steering wheel column. Damn thing had caught fire! Definitely ranks as one of the more terrifying moments in my life.

All of those cars, I knew how to check the oil, fill the windscreen water, clean the spark plugs and top up the oil but then the cars started to get a bit more complicated and we started to be able to afford to have them serviced at a garage so I didn’t have to do that anymore.

When we moved to America we bought a Honda Odyssey which to be fair was a nice car even if it was a behemoth of a car. But then that car developed a very annoying quirk of simply refusing to do anything when you turned the key. It not only wouldn’t turn over, but none of the electrics would turn on – it would stay as dead as a dodo. This refusal to start was completely random but incredibly annoying. Being stuck in a car park with 3 children in the car is no fun and even less fun is being stuck in the car knowing you have to be somewhere in 10 minutes to pick up one of the aforementioned children. Of course as soon as the AAA man arrived and tried the car, the damn thing would start every time. The garage told me to stick my key into a tiny slot on the steering wheel to supposedly reset what was going wrong. Even this fix was random though, only working about a third of the time. And every time I was convinced I was going to electrocute myself. So we had to get rid of that car.

The replacement to that Odyssey was another Odyssey which was mechanically fine but had a very annoying tendency to appear to want to shed itself of its front and rear bumpers. I would periodically have to walk round it kicking the bits back together.

Which more or less leads me to my new second hand car, a Subaru Forester. I’ve had it one day and already it has reduced Ella and me to tears of laughter in it. In theory I can “dial a number by voice” except the wretched machine doesn’t recognise my British accent (or my Welsh or American ones, we tried them as well), so it took 16 tries to get it to understand the phone number I was asking it to dial. I don’t think I’ll be using that feature much. However, the fact that I have been reduced to tears of laughter instead of tears of anger or frustration bodes well for this car. Maybe I’ll be alright with her. We decided she deserved a name and now instead of being warily resigned to something going wrong with it I am cautiously optimistic about Tilly : )