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...