Goodness Gracious Great Balls Of Ice!

I have been thinking for a little while that perhaps now is the time I should be changing my car. My current chariot is a modest 10 year old Ford fiesta which I bought when it was just two years old. Unfortunately it is now due to have its timing belt replaced which petrol heads among you will know is an expensive job as it is a 'wet belt' so requires a lot of labour to do the work. Obviously given its age, I have to decide if it makes financial sense to fork out lots of cash to ensure it keeps running effectively or trade it in for something newer. It's tricky though as it's been a very efficient and cheap to run motor, giving me much pleasure on longer runs where its smoothness shines through. This is in stark contrast to what went before when I had a small Mazda 2 which although fine for a while, developed an irritating fault after I'd had it about a year where the air-con periodically switched from ' pleasantly warm environment' to 'couldn't care less' and resulted in the freezing of my nether and all other regions, and in winter caused my gentleman's assortment and bric a brac sundries to shiver uncontrollably inside of my designer boxers despite my frantic efforts to keep warm by furiously trying to de-mist the windscreen with a cloth, thus allowing partial vision and ensure the car did not leave the road and plunge into a ditch!

Now I can almost hear the outcry from sections of the readership of Jap-crap but that would I feel be unfair because before this fault materialised the Mazda had been by far the best car I had owned, even if that was not a difficult honour to achieve when compared to the likes of my Fiat Punto mk1 which just about went from nought to sixty in the same day, my other little Ford which never went above 38 mph according to its faulty speedo and countless other wheelie bins I have had the misfortune to drive. I say drive, though for some of them that may be a little misleading, As you can imagine at my age I have been the proud owner of some vehicles which now fall very much into the vintage class. So it was more like being the helmsman aboard a Trans-Atlantic yacht, caught in a force 9 gale. In fact one of my previous vehicles had a steering wheel of such huge dimensions it would have been better suited to an eighteenth century Tea Clipper and it was more than a little disconcerting that despite having 'size' on its side it still failed to have much impact on the aim of the wheels no matter how many heaves I made on it. That and the drivers door window which would periodically shake itself down and in winter expose me to the gale force south-westerlies that this area is renowned for carrying enough rain to irrigate the Sahara desert and allow rice to be grown in the passenger footwell!  A friend of mine, who incidentally wears corduroy trousers, has leather elbow patches on his jacket and earns an obscene amount of money investing other people's money, has recommended a Volvo for my new wheels, an incredibly unhelpful suggestion when the German cars are out of my price range and the Volvo is a pound more! Of course the Volvo has more stars for safety than Alan Sugar has apprentices and looks like a very lovely car but I'm not sure I need 5 airbags to deploy every time I burp at the wheel so for now the search continues, for as long as it takes, through the long and very hot summer and on into the autumn.

No problem though, I've got the perfect car for sweat free motoring, thank heavens for the fiestas air conditioning!

                                                                       jealous or what!