Carter Vs The Ministry of Transport Part II

I passed my driving test with two minor faults, at the first attempt, about 4 months after my 17th birthday. I don’t want you to think that I’m bragging so I shall also inform you that I put my Mum’s Mini Metro into the back of a parked Mazda 323, on the actual day of my 17th birthday.

I had learnt to drive in that Mini Metro and also in my driving instructor’s Peugeot 205 so perhaps it was a tad ambitious of me to be driving a bus of a Cortina Estate a mere month later. My Gran sold me her MkIV Cortina Estate for a quid and this car was known affectionately as Ecto One.

When I told my Dad that the fag lighter in it actually worked, he informed me “That’s not a fag lighter son, that’s a cigar lighter. This was an executive’s car.”

The starter motor was dodgy as hell which necessitated parking on a hill, every time I parked, so I could bump start it if the need arose. The void bushes were shot and it felt like I was fishtailing up the road, despite keeping a perfectly straight line. It handled like a boat and the combination of 17 year old driver, rear wheel drive and any type of adverse weather was potentially lethal.

On the plus side; the stereo worked a treat, we could cram eight of us in to go to the beach and goddamn, I loved that car.

I’ve blogged before about my car history and only a fortnight ago I was penning the obituary for my last car. It took less than one public transport based round trip to work to realise that no, getting to work by train is not a viable enterprise for me.

Doing the public transport commute dance requires the following steps: I have to get up at 5am, pay £1.50 for the bus, £15.80 for the train and I don’t get to work until after 8. I then don’t finish work until gone 5pm, the next train from Malvern, if it’s on time, isn’t until 6:15pm and, if I’m lucky enough to catch an evening bus back in Wolves to my street for another £1.50, I don’t get back through my front door until gone 8pm.

The annual Carter Car Hunt it is then.

I checked my finances and pulled up the Auto Trader website. There are many cheap cars out there but I suspected that there was very little chance of bagging another Ecto One. I had 400 quid to spend and I needed to find a diesel that could handle 80 miles a day, had some ticket and wasn’t going to fall apart on me.

The first thing to do in these situations is to ring one’s Mum and have a good cry.

After the consultation with the parental units, miraculously my budget had increased and so had the expectations of the type of car I should be looking for.

Don’t look at me like that. I’ve had enough. In the words of John Lennon “A working class hero is something to be, a working class hero means bugger all to me.” Or at least, that’s how I interpreted it.

Wolves to Malvern is 40 miles. That’s 80 miles a day, 400 miles a week and, near as damnit is to swearing, 20,000 miles a year. Providing I get out of bed by 6 it takes an hour in the morning and an hour and a half to get home. That’s a whopping 12 and half hours a week spent on the road just commuting.

In the last 4 years I’ve destroyed a Peugeot 109 1.4 diesel, a 306 1.9 diesel and a Citroen ZX 1.9TD. Each of these cars were purchased at the bottom end of the market and performed accordingly.

First things first, I needed to get rid of the Citroen. I ripped the stereo out, took my golf shoes out of the boot, sent the tax disc off and got a rebate of 68 quid for 4 full months. I then rang one of those car scrap recovery places and left the keys, logbook and an envelope in the glovey for them to post my part of the V5 and the £100 through my door. When I returned from work that night, five twenty pound notes had been posted through the letter box into the porch with my part of the logbook but they’d neglected to use the envelope...

The door to the porch is completely see through.

I was determined to clear all of my debts before getting a half decent motor but sod it. For the last three weeks I’ve been driving to work in my newly acquired 2002 Mondeo 2.0TDCi. It’s comfortable, runs nicely, has reduced the diesel bill and has an even nicer stereo than Ecto 1 had. It’s a quantum leap in quality and I am glad that I was bullied into getting it by my Mum and my girlfriend.

I thought I heard the steering pump making a distressed noise and I was ready to nosedive into despair. I took the car to the garage this morning, and my mechanic said "I can't seem to find anything wrong with your car Mr. Magna." I never thought I would hear him say those words. He looked rather ashen faced as he told me this. I could tell he was trying to work out how to tell his kids that Christmas was cancelled and that he could only afford to keep one of them.

If you’re a regular reader of this here blog then you are aware that I somehow, things keep happening to me. Some of this is my fault and some of it is pure bad luck. This morning, Hotdog57 suggested that everyone start calling me Murphy. I smiled at such a daft notion, it was obvious that the tide was beginning to turn for Mrs. Magna’s little boy.

I thought the laughter was rather unnecessary and went on a little too long when we discovered that I had a puncture. 130 quid for a new pair of tyres.

Jesus wept.