Road rage

I have been silent for the past 48 hours, perhaps because I have been busy rushing about on wheels. I borrowed V’s car to transport children to and from their school concerts and suddenly the world was much faster again. It was so convenient. And yet… How was it Coco and I were only just in time for school this morning? Surely we should have been there a good five or ten minutes earlier? No. My inherent inability to time anything, combined with infuriating traffic meant that we were running late. And it was stressful. 

True, it is no picnic when Coco and I are hurrying up the road on foot and in the rain, but at least I am not cursing the slowness of vehicles in front of me. Why is it that when the lights turn green, other cars are so slow to get into gear and move off, so that only two or three get through the lights before they change? If I’m at the front I am off and away. I mean, it is just so inconsiderate, Don’t these people know there are cars behind…And therein lies a good reason for my having a break from driving a car. Get me behind a wheel and my temper does not improve. Add to that the stress of cars that tailgate (had one of those this evening), the problem of parking, the fear of prangs (more so when one is driving a friend’s car), the cost of prangs (last year I was charged almost £300 by a garage for a couple of inches of paintwork that I scraped off someone else’s car - by accident of course) and stalling at the traffic lights and driving is really a bit of a health hazard.

Think I am neurotic? I don’t think I am alone. According to the New England Journal of Medicine (October 21, 2004), via Chris Balish (I can’t afford to download the actual paper at the moment) sitting in traffic nearly triples the risk of suffering a heart attack a short while later. Of course, before you all start worrying and your blood pressure shoots up at this statement, the risk is pretty slim to start with. Nevertheless, sitting in traffic (breathing in fumes as pollution inside the car is worse than outside) is clearly not doing us the world of good.

But having the car today was so useful. Lexy, Ted and I didn’t have to walk home from the concert in the dark, lugging large viola cases. I gave my friend’s grandson a lift to school after he had missed the bus this morning. And if I hadn’t already chucked them, I could have taken all those Tetra paks down to the recycling spot.

Did the pros outweigh the cons? I will have to think on that.

Incidentally, I rather liked this sentiment that I found on the website www.spike.com - "Road rage is part of human nature. If you spend enough time every day in your car, inevitably some jackass will pull a stunt that just defies all logic and regard for the motorists around them. Once you’ve experienced this enough times, you’re bound to lose it sooner or later. So when you end up going off the deep end, you might as well have a kickass soundtrack to compliment the fury." The writer (who apparently did not "represent the opinions of Spike TV or its affiliates", in case someone sued I guess), then listed a choice of ten songs. It reminded me of another disadvantage to not driving. I can't try out new CDs so easily. I must get round to doing a new walking playlist for my iPod. But somehow, Motorcycle Emptiness by Manic Street Preachers won't sound as good on foot.

Public Image

Today I cleared out the car ready for the scrap yard. This was quite a poignant occasion. Unlike many people, I do not get particularly attached to cars, as I view them as just a means of getting (unhealthily) from A to B. No, I invest nothing in them emotionally. Think again (and stop sounding so smug). As I went through the mess of sweet wrappers and car park tickets, I found some interesting pickings. Apart from CDs and enough change for a bus ride, I found all manner of mementos of family life - a shoe; pop corn from Lexy’s birthday treat with her two best friends who both live far away now; wellington boots; a train ticket from when E and I went to see Hamlet with Rory Kinnear in it (it’s back at the Lyttelton Theatre in April, see it if you can); a stone which had both fossils in it and some chocolate stuck to it; the toy crocodile that Coco bought me at the school fair and who used to sit on the dashboard in a stand probably intended for a Sat Nav; briefly, a cat. Clearly our car was a little home from home, an extension of us as a family (messy but friendly is the message I think it gives out). 

So in this way are we so different from those with powerful give-it-some-throttle-boys cars with model names like ‘Thrust’, or cheeky little numbers called ‘Party Time’, or ‘Independent Ms’? People who are attracted to cars because of their image - or so the multi-million pound advertising industry would lead us to think. Unwittingly perhaps, we had owned the epitome of the family car, a big clunky thing that chuntered along filled with the haphazard debris of family life. It wasn’t sexy but I bet you could ad campaign out of it - large but cosy, able to take the family away while making them feel at home. Only, it isn’t able to take the family anywhere as it is dead and far too expensive to resurrect, which is what the ads don’t tell you.

There were a few other bits and pieces that I removed from the car. These included my parking permit for work (my colleagues are celebrating the demise of my tank as there is now far more space in the car park), the tax disc and a box of Tetra paks to recycle. These last two gave me cause to rant. I decided to cash in my tax disc by telephoning the DVLA. Tell me, DO THEY NOT HAVE HUMAN BEINGS WORKING AT THAT PLACE? Is it reasonable to spend 10 minutes on the phone and not speak to a single person, particularly when pressing ‘3’ or ‘9’ or whatever, has taken you up some dead end? I know I can cancel it on line. I should have done that in the first place, but for some reason I felt the need to pick up the phone. Never again.

Also, what the heck am I going to do with all these Tetra paks that I was going to recycle? I usually take them, and the cardboard, to the car park near work. Last time I tried, the Tetra pak recycling bin was full so I left them in the car. Now, how am I going to recycle them and the cardboard? We have some roadside recycling but not much. I notice that further down the hill more is collected - food waste for instance - and nip over the boundary into the next county and whole wheelie bin loads are taken instead of a few poxy boxes. But up here in the cold of the hills where I live (ie about a mile further on) we are expected to go green by getting in our cars and driving to the recycling centres. Sense? I think not.

And don’t suggest I take a bin liner of recycling with me on the bus. I’m not that eccentric.

And I would walk 10,000 steps

I seem to have more energy. Energy is not my strong point. Yes, I can keep myself going if I have to but much of the time I long to sleep, an occupation often denied the parent with three children, a busy lifestyle and a seemingly endless amount of housework to undertake. For the last couple of days, however, I have felt better. Of course, two days out of a life-time is not particularly significant if you want to consider statistics, but I do wonder if it has anything to do with the exercise I am now taking. For the past 17 days I have been without a car. I have had the odd lift and I have taken a few buses, but on the whole I have walked, generally about 40 minutes to an hour a day. And consider what I have done since Friday…

This will be as nothing to the super-active among you, but on Friday I walked up and down to Coco’s school twice (40-50 minutes in all), I then hacked branches off a vicious spiky bush on the edge of our garden, cleared brambles, hauled this all to the skip we have hired in one of my regular and always unsuccessful attempts to declutter, bounced on the trampoline with the kids (note to self: remember those pelvic floor exercises), cooked a meal and hiked back up the hill to a friend’s house so that she and I could go to a jazz concert. Yesterday I walked for another 40 minutes or so, bounced once again on the trampoline and played skittles (badly) at the local community hall. Today I’ve walked, hauled more spiky plant around, cleaned the kitchen, cooked a couple of meals without moaning (meals which I haven’t burned moreover, my culinary skills being second to, er, most) and am still feeling active. I haven’t felt this good in an age, probably not since the age that preceded children.

Could there be a link? Obviously the Ramblers Association to whom I turned for information on walking (www.ramblers.org.uk) have a vested interest in promoting walking as a GOOD THING, but their claims seem to be backed up by research, that walking can just 30 minutes a day can make a difference to the way we feel, and not just in aching legs (believe me, I’ve felt those). The NHS talks about walking 10,000 steps a day – about eight km or five miles – as a way to keep our hearts healthy and reduce our body fat, and then there are all the other benefits  - lower blood pressure, lower cholesterol, higher bone density, improved moods, reduced risk of colon cancer, reduced risk of diabetes (non-insulin dependant variety), countering the effects of osteoarthritis, and of course, the one that worries most of us, reduced body weight.

Lecture over. It’s working for me.You can laugh at me when I am moaning and groaning next week. One thing though, walking can be dangerous. Drivers of large vehicles do not necessarily accept that pedestrians have a right to the pavement. Vast lorries with giant diggers on their backs may be what small children dream of driving, but they are downright scary, especially when they are hooting at a mother and child to move off the pavement (into what? I ask you) so that they can get past and speed 20 or so yards to the traffic lights up ahead. 

All this walking hasn’t stopped me getting on my high horse.

Money, Money, Money

A book arrived for me this morning. It dropped through the letter box just a couple of days after I ordered it - online of course. See, no car needed. Admittedly, I did not go to a small, independent bookshop (I would have had to have driven there as the nearest one is a good ten miles away) and as a result of my and other people’s buying habits these independent bookshops are going out of business (damn! Another thing to worry about!). Also, authors receive tuppence ha’penny when their books are sold through  places like Amazon where prices are slashed heavily. No such thing as a free lunch - or book.

Anyway, a package dropped through the letter box giving me the double thrill of opening first a  parcel and then a book, crisp, sleek and inviting. I feel a similar thrill when I pick up a hand of cards - what rich pickings are there, what ace of trumps to win the hand? No aces but the book How to Live Well Without Owning a Car, by Chris Balish. It promises tips on how to “save money, breathe easier, and get more mileage out of life”. We can but hope.

Chris is an American and the book talks about dollars and gas, but the principles are the same - money, environment, stress and so forth (I am sure I shall be telling you more about Chris as time goes on). My researches into the British market have not yielded much fruit yet. There has been the occasional article, a Newsnight journalist who agreed to give up his car for a year, and a number of websites but no British books yet. If I am wrong, let me know. I wonder, though, why this is. Is it that we are still so happy with our car culture despite the growing bills that giving one up appears eccentric, the territory of the dippy hippies, the counter culturalists. I don’t think I fit particularly well into these categories. (What? Having 11 cats is eccentric?)

Chris doesn’t seem to be eccentric either but he is certainly counter the car culture for reasons that were initially financial. He points out the hidden costs of cars, including depreciation. I said I reckoned that our car cost us about £4,000 a year, in part based on the amount per mile that the Inland Revenue allow me to put against tax, ie 40p a mile, an amount decided on long before fuel reached its current heady heights.  I expect the £4,000 is an underestimate. More than this, I hadn’t thought clearly about the fact that we bought the car for £2,700 14 months ago and now it is worth around £50 for scrap. That’s about £190 a month or £2,280 a year, meaning that the car has cost £6,280 in a year, give or take a few hundred pounds. And that doesn’t take into account car parking charges or the new tyres we bought not so long ago. There are various clever sums that you can do to work out your average cost per mile, but I won’t bore you with the details and you can look them up yourself if you wish (www.whatgas.com/car-finance/car-running-costs.html).

Of course, it might not have been that bad. If our old car had not been written off - by someone reversing in a car park and not seeing at least two of the cars parked there, ours and another poor innocent’s - it might well be going today and we would have spent a lot less. But you can’t foresee what someone will do (self included) and since we have had two cars written off in two years, both by people driving into the back of them, the odds seem stacked against us. 

So the long and the short of it is, having a car has cost us more than £6,000 in the last year. That’s one heck of a lot of money. So not having a car will, as Chris says, help us save money, though not as much as we would do if we weren’t planning to hire cars from time to time. Yesterday I worked out how it would help us‘breathe easier’. But will it really help us‘get more mileage out of life’? Well, so far I have been enjoying the walks to and from school so that it something. However, the sun has been shining recently and that makes everything better. Just wait until it’s pouring with rain and a wind is howling round my chilly head. Then I will be moaning.

Temptation!

Lead me not into temptation. My friend V has broken her thumb (in a bizarre standing up accident, best leave it unsolved) and cannot drive. She has generously offered me the use of her car and even now the keys are burning a hole in my pocket. But I have just written about the dreadful pollution that cars bring upon the hapless earth and if I use the car I shall be feel guilty again (incidentally, I was not brought up a Catholic - there are branches of the Protestant church that deal just as effectively in guilt). However, today Coco needed new shoes - his old ones are worn through so badly that he announced on the way to school that he could feel the road with one of his feet (the result of all this walking?). Plus there were a couple of parcels awaiting me at the post office. In a car I could whizz down to town. On the other hand, a bus journey would be fun for Coco for whom a bus is an esoteric delight.

The bus was late. Very late. For the first few minutes I was charmed by the way Coco could entertain himself and me with inspecting a prickly holly bush, or playing ‘guess the bird’ (you'd have guessed red and brown to be a robin wouldn’t you? Wrong). For the next few minutes I worried about him hopping about on the narrow pavement close to the busy road. Thereafter I worried about not getting to the post office in time. If only I had borrowed the car. 

Then the driver charged me a full fair for Coco who is seven. Still, not as bad as the jobsworth who charged me over the odds because I had confused the bus stops and wanted to get off two stops further on. There was, E tells me, a bus driver who regularly charged his passengers half fares and simply put the money straight in his pocket. A sort of “I’ll give you a cheap ride if you don’t grass me up”. He’s no longer on that route. I wonder if he drives buses at all now.

I have been rather taken aback by the price bus tickets. Surely it can’t cost £1.60 for that five minute journey? It does. I have tried to factor this in to my sums. For, despite any apparent smugness about no longer polluting the planet, spending quality time watching my son hopping dangerously close to heavy traffic and so on, this carlessness is first and foremost a financial affair. Going without a car has to be cheaper, doesn’t it? Doesn’t it?

That certainly would be the case if we decided to stay within a limited area. I have plenty of friends who do not drive and have always used buses. But most of their own friends and family are local.  I mentioned that ours seem to be flung around the country and visits to them will therefore require long distance transport. I tried to arrange to take Lexy to Suffolk by train to see her great friend but did not have the spare £75 it would have cost for the fares. And the coach took so long that a short weekend was out of the question unless time spent in a squashed, stuffy vehicle, feeling sick is your idea of a holiday. 

The answer is to hire cars and enjoy meandering the motorways of Britain (as if). Hiring a car from a local company seems good value. But a timely warning came from my friend A. Her sister had hired a car, pranged it and been landed with a £600 ‘excess’ bill. Before I speed off in a fancy little KA (ideal for a trip down to my parents either alone or with one child) or swing one of their people carriers out onto the road, I need to read the small print. Oh, and find my drivers licence. And of course, when you hire a car, you still have to pay for the fuel which, this week, was in the 130s to 140s a litre. I can vaguely remember when petrol reached £1 a gallon and that was shocking enough.

So I have been doing the sums and have concluded that running our old car probably cost in the region of £4000-£5000 a year, taking into account tax and insurance and variable maintenance bills. Hiring a car to drive to the Scottish islands in the summer will cost, including fuel, something like £750, hiring one to visit my parents will be around £110. And that may be without the insurance needed to bring my excess bill down to a more manageable £100. 

On the other hand, even if we mended our old tank, or bought a new one, who’s to say it wouldn’t break down and cost a bomb to fix? In a hire car, a breakdown would be inconvenient bust cost nothing. Sorry Mr W, we may well stay carless a little longer. 

But not next week. Next week there are complicated evenings requiring trips to school and back for concerts. There will be no smug walking the mile there and back. No, I shall drive V’s car with pleasure.

Guilty feet ain't got no rhythm

The phone call came. It is time to put the car out of its misery. The mechanic who broke the news - a man  (let’s call him Mr W) who has cared for our cars for many years - came round with the keys so that we could collect our few belongings from within, prior to the end. He was visibly upset. This was the third car this week that had been told to prepare for the great scrap heap in the sky. I wanted to comfort him, tell him it wasn’t his fault. He refused to take money for the many hours of work he had undertaken to try to save my beast. He spoke of new cars. And I felt guilty.

Guilt is a major part of this new regime. You might imagine that I should feel guilty for all the miles of gas-guzzling, fume-pumping, greenhouse effect-increasing driving that I had done. My tank chucked out more Carbon Dioxide (greenhouse gas) than most. And car exhaust contains other nasties like Carbon Monoxide, also a greenhouse gas. Alarmingly, transport is estimated to account for 20-25% of all greenhouse gas emissions. I’m never sure how people work out these statistics but they sound scary. Apparently, when they measured air quality in a 2004 Carfree Day in Montreal, Canada, there was a 90% reduction in the level of Nitrogen Monoxide and a 100% reduction in Carbon Monoxide within the area closed to cars that day compared with readings taken the same day at place where motor traffic was normal.  And this isn’t even considering the Sulphur Dioxide, Benzene, Formaldehyde, Polycyclic Hydrocarbon and something called suspended particles, PM-10 particles less than 10 microns in size, whatever these are. I know by their very names that they are BAD. (Check out www.nutramed.com/environment/carschemicals.htm and www.worldcarfree.net for all you need to know and more).

No, that isn’t what is making me feel guilty. It’s everything else. I felt guilty as Mr W worried about my not having a car. He was worrying for me and the family, but I did not like to tell him that I was considering the whole carless exercise, as it struck me that one customer with one less car would mean less work for him and less income. Everything is connected.

And then there is the family. Mr W is right to worry. I cannot take them to the places they want. Yes, this is liberating, but at a cost. Ted the teenager wants to visit a theme park with some friends (“You owe me two years’ birthday treats!” True, but unhelpful given the family’s current economic downturn). Public transport is available, and will take, oh, let’s see, four times as long. Lexy had stomach ache and I felt I should drive her to school, but I couldn’t. I missed the bus and the next one would make me 15 minutes late to pick up Coco. The kitten got her paw stuck in a drawer and had to go to the vet. She had to be carried and was most put out.

I am relying on feet, on buses but also on friends and this adds to my guilt. I don’t want to burden them. There again, I tried to avoid burdening one friend who had already given me and Ted a lift. I pretended that I didn’t need her to take me back afterwards. Turned out she was tormented by her own guilt at not having driven me home. Oh boy, this is complicated.

Still, at least E made everything better by saying “I don’t know that being without a car is fair on the kids”.

Lift off or let down?

So why on earth am I actually considering living without a car? And what do I mean by the fact that that first 10 days carless days haven't’t gone too badly? Quite apart from the cancelled visits, I have had to walk to school each day (only 10-15 minutes but about three in the car and I find getting up in the morning a bit of a challenge) and we have only just made it. I have had to let down two friends, one of whom needed a lift (to a place that I too wanted to visit) and the other of whom needed something picked up from a nearby town. I have had to wait for late buses and struggle back with heavy shopping, dash from bus stop to school and then there was the problem of Tuesday evening.

Tuesday evenings are a logistical challenge even with a car, involving getting home from work in time to take eldest son to a drama class (“why are you late Mum, you’re always late”…”Sorry, darling, traffic!” picking him up again at 8pm, dropping him home to babysit the younger two while husband and I go to our drama class at 8.15pm, and in between that I have to drop off the babysitter who  has  picked up the youngest one from school and stayed until I am home.  Without a car that seemed well-nigh impossible.

It wasn’t quite impossible, thanks to the drama teacher herself who drove us around, and the babysitter’s own home being within walking distance of ours. The thing is, we have had to rely on other people to help and that isn’t ideal. You can ask favours of other people for a short while but when does this become using them? And what about their own busy lives? Shouldn’t we stand on our own two feet, or drive on our own four wheels?

Perhaps at this stage I should introduce the family. We are a middle class, middle income family with three children living in a semi-detached house on the cheaper, north, side of an all-too-expensive town. We have a by-pass that cuts through the town in a rather bizarre manner. The south side of the by-pass has, on the whole, but not exclusively, more des-reses, but where we are is very pleasant. It’s just not near that many shops. We have a small ‘Express’ version of a supermarket chain, which sells most of what is needed but is certainly more expensive than its larger cousins. There are two corner shops, one better stocked than the other, a newsagents, a pharmacy, a pizza take- away place and a dog grooming parlour. We also have a vet, so dog owners at least can take care of their pooches inside and out. There are enough schools to cater for everyone unless you are very particular in which case you’d better move south of the by-pass and pay a bit, er lot, more.

We have three children at these local schools - two (Teenage Ted and Lexy) at secondary and one (Coco the Bear) at primary. (They have chosen these blog names themselves). The schools are within walking distance, (“Please drive me, I am tired/have got a lot to carry/will get wet/have a bone in my leg…”). My husband, E, commutes to London using bus, train and tube. The timetables tie in with each other at certain times of day. Outside these hours he has a 30 minute walk to/from the local train station (“Can you give me a lift, please?”). I work a couple of days a week in the local town - about two miles to my office - and the rest I spend at home doing all the normal housewifery type things like picking up after the children, cleaning, shopping, and, in theory, writing my best seller.  I’m also part of a growing community movement which is forming links between disparate groups and, as a clearly vital part of this, I spend much of Thursday having coffee and cake at a local church.

At a recent meeting to discuss these links it was suggested that we form a type of LETS group  (Local Exchange Trading Scheme) whereby local people exchange goods and services without needing money. The plan - as yet unfulfilled - has been to write down a list of what we could offer and what we would like to have. I had planned to offer lifts, deliveries and pick-ups using my huge green vehicle. In return, I hoped to find someone who could do some DIY and FINALLY put the bedroom door back on (we took it off and removed crucial pieces of wood around it when two kittens went missing somewhere beneath the floorboards, but that is another story with a happy ending - though not for the woodwork). Without a car I can’t do that. 

In fact, having a car has been important to my part in the local community. I have seen myself as a lift-giver. Now I can’t be and am turning into a lift-beggar. 

This is a curious development. I don’t like it. Being the person who could give lifts was something that defined me. Then again, it was something I was getting tired of, but I could never bring myself to say no, not even to Teenage Ted. Well I would say “I’m never giving you a lift to school again, do you hear me, you ungrateful little…” or some other sweet sentiments, but guess what, good parent that I am, I never stuck to my word. Now I can’t give any lifts! Yipee!

My legs ache with all the walking to and from Coco the Bear’s school though.

And eighteen hundred pounds (or so) went up in smoke

I never intended to give up the car for Lent. Chocolate, wine, cigarettes, that's the normal sort of thing - luxuries that don't normally do you much good at least in excess. Of course, Lent could be about taking up something positive instead and so far I had been trying to take up getting my youngest child to school on time. Not having a car wasn't going to help that...


But on Thursday, March 10th (technically a day into Lent) I was happily driving up a hill chuckling at my latest faux pas (asking a woman I had recently met if she knew a particular man who lived near me, only to discover that this was her ex-husband) when the car - an aged chunky tank of a people carrier suitable for transporting my three children and often their friends - started to moan, whirr and groan and a worrying orange light appeared on the dashboard. I slowed the car and glanced in the mirror, concerned that I was holding up the traffic. A large white shape was close on my tail, probably a van and no doubt the driver was cursing me. But it was a curious, rather amorphous van. No, it was a cloud of my exhaust fumes.



At this point I was about five minutes drive, but 25 minutes walk, from my son's school and he was due out in five minutes. There was nowhere to stop and the road was bendy and steep. No doubt I shouldn't have done, but I carried on driving, slowly, very low revs, and crawled my way to a parking place near the school, and then we crawled home.

That was 10 days ago. Since then I have discovered that the fuel injectors have gone, that one of them in embedded somewhere that makes it impossible to extract - my teenage son's bedroom floor perhaps - and the cost of making the tank roadworthy again will be something akin to the annual turnover of a multinational company. The car is dead, long live the bus.

Only buses work to their own timetables, which are not mine and not even those that are printed at bus stops, and there are children to fetch and carry; work to get to, and from, often in time to fetch and carry aforementioned children; there is shopping to do; and there are friends and family in other parts of the country. My parents live 70 miles away and are not in the best of health; my mother-in-law is 100 miles away; my brother lives 150 miles away as do some of our best friends; my daughter's two best friends now live in Cornwall and Suffolk (200 and 150 miles away respctively). Hmm. New car perhaps.

And here is the next problem. We are skint. Cars cost money. The sums don't add up. Car loan? Possibly but they also cost money.

I mentioned that the car broke down ten days ago. In the meantime we have managed pretty well. True we have not gone to Gloucestershire to visit my parents, or to Suffolk, both trips that we had planned, and that has been a disappointment, but we are rescheduling and it won't be for ever. Or will it? What would happen if we didn't have a car, for a while at least? Would we manage? Would our lives fall apart and friendships be irrevocably broken down? We could hire cars in an emergency, we could walk more, we could shop online, we could plan our time around public transport. It could be fun.

Never trust a mother who tells you that something inconvenient can be fun...