06052006.jpg

Originally uploaded by nilexuk.

I have been back to the dealership and finalized everything including the negotiated lower price — but it’s going to take them until Friday to knock out all the dings and get it through its MOT.

And guess what the first job in the new car is looking like it’s going to be? Picking up the cats.

Distressed cats and recently valeted upholstry are not a combination that go together too well, even if P has picked up some rather splendid waterproff cat-carriers.

Joke

Originally uploaded by nilexuk.

Are you catching the train? Be careful! It might be heavy.

I was just settling into another depressing what-car-might-be-ok-for-the-money trawl on the internet when Renault phoned back.

The car I liked is available again! The other people trying to buy it had only put a deposit down and weren’t able to get finance to cover the cost.

Well.

“Well, Mr Dealer, I have the money all ready now. But I’m afraid I can’t quite stretch to $askingprice. The maximum I can do is $(askingprice-800).”

“That’s quite a drop — I’ll have to ask my manager.”

“You do that – but make sure you tell him that I have the money ready and waiting and can pop down and pay first thing tomorrow.”

Mr Dealer hangs up. I pace nervously round the office and my colleagues congratulate me on my tough haggling stance. It helps that I’ve been having this conversation in my head for at least the last ten days.

I wait.

Time passes.

Phone rings. “Well, Mr Foster, my manager can do that, but he wants a deposit from you now over the phone.”

I don’t think I’ve ever read my credit card number out so fast.

I sign the papers tomorrow, I should get to drive it away on Tuesday.

They’ll even part-ex my old Skoda, although I’m doing that for the convenience of them taking it off my hands rather than the actual trade-in value, which we all agree is negligeable.

I’ve earned this

Originally uploaded by nilexuk.

I’ve been leafletting since 8am. It is polling day, so that was a really light escape. That was the earliest I could get here by public transport, and not bad since I didn’t leave here til long gone 9 last night. Everything takes longer by bus — but it gives me a cracking excuse for not turning up at 5am. Sorry, but first bus ain’t til 0705.

My feet are killing me, I’ve nearly walked through the soles of my trainers, my legs ache and my arms are dropping off because not only have I been shoving leaflets through doors, for most of the morning I’ve been carrying a ton of leaflets around so I don’t keep having to walk back to base.

My hands and arms are covered in minor abrasions from bag handles and the sharper letterboxes. Worst of all, I’ve been mauled by a sodding cat! You learn to expect the dogs – the straightforward ones that bark when you open the gate, the ones that wait to bark until you’re a bit closer and make you jump out of your skin, and the sneaky ones that lie silently in wait on the doormat and then have your finger off without warning. But a cat? This one was sitting quietly under the letterbox and the first I knew was when it launched itself claws first at the sill and drew blood from my finger.

Remind me – why do I do this?

Anyway, I’m sitting in a pub to take the weight off and use the facilities. I’m allowed – I had a letter for the landlord. Would have been rude not to have a quick drink. So I’m sitting here moblogging to avoid eyeballing a resident I just had a run-in with.

“That Deidre [candidate] must have a bob or two. I’ve had 6 leaflets!”

Six, eh? Is that all?

I’ve earned this

Originally uploaded by nilexuk.

I’ve been leafletting since 8am. It is polling day, so that was a really light escape. That was the earliest I could get here by public transport, and not bad since I didn’t leave here til long gone 9 last night. Everything takes longer by bus — but it gives me a cracking excuse for not turning up at 5am. Sorry, but first bus ain’t til 0705.

My feet are killing me, I’ve nearly walked through the soles of my trainers, my legs ache and my arms are dropping off because not only have I been shoving leaflets through doors, for most of the morning I’ve been carrying a ton of leaflets around so I don’t keep having to walk back to base.

My hands and arms are covered in minor abrasions from bag handles and the sharper letterboxes. Worst of all, I’ve been mauled by a sodding cat! You learn to expect the dogs – the straightforward ones that bark when you open the gate, the ones that wait to bark until you’re a bit closer and make you jump out of your skin, and the sneaky ones that lie silently in wait on the doormat and then have your finger off without warning. But a cat? This one was sitting quietly under the letterbox and the first I knew was when it launched itself claws first at the sill and drew blood from my finger.

Remind me – why do I do this?

Anyway, I’m sitting in a pub to take the weight off and use the facilities. I’m allowed – I had a letter for the landlord. Would have been rude not to have a quick drink. So I’m sitting here moblogging to avoid eyeballing a resident I just had a run-in with.

“That Deidre [candidate] must have a bob or two. I’ve had 6 leaflets!”

Six, eh? Is that all?

A few days ago, I went to test drive a nearly-new Clio.

I’m not convinced of the point of test-driving anything, since anything I get behind the wheel of is going to feel incredibly smooth in comparison to my current car.

In any case, getting into a Clio and more importantly, looking in its boot and putting the back seats down, convinced me that it’s too small. At least, too  small to go camping in.  There’s no way I could do a booze cruise in something that size.

Right next to it at the dealership was a Megane that was almost in my price range.  I didn’t actually test drive that, but the guy let me sit in it and play with the controls, and somehow, I was immediately sold.  It had soo many wazzocky extras, that car just had to mine.

It had

• Card instead of key
• Just press the clutch and hit the ‘start’ button
• Automatic windscreen wipers that sense the rain
• Automatic headlights that come on by themselves when it gets dark
• Oddment holders aplenty
• Fully customizable cockpit — the seat moved through four dimensions, the steering wheel was adjustable
• Green alligators
• Long necked geese
• Humpy-back camels
• Chimpanzees

Without even having started the ignition, I had to have the car.

So I went away and got the money together to buy it and phoned the dealership to start the haggling.

“I’m phoning about the ’52 Megane”

“What colour was it?”  (Eh?  I thought it was just the girls who worried about colour) “Flame red?  Oh, sorry mate, that one’s gone.”

Gone?  GONE???  You sold MY CAR?????

Grrr.  Now I have to go back to the drawing board and try and work out what I actually like.  Is there any point going for wazzocky automatic windscreen wipers or will they just break and annoy me?

One thing I have learned, and that’s car dealer websites are universally awful.  The manufacturers are trying to put every exciting new thing on their sites and take hours to load, the local dealerships use flash and have no alternatives. Half the time the searches pull up the wrong results.  They refuse to work on Firefox.  I’ve had to fire up Iexplore.exe more times in the last two weeks than in the whole of the last year, just to look at cars!

And I’m no further foward.  I have to start from scratch on what I think I want.  I had been quite prepared to trade the green colour for wazzocky features.  Would I do that again?  Should I just walk the 0.3 miles to Millennium Car Supermarket and drive away the first piece of trash that meets my budget and has a big boot?

Questions, questions.

I’ve been spending more time on Wikipedia. Half the time I go there because something I’ve Googled has thrown up a wikipedia link amongst the first few.

But I like the site, and have been visiting more often. Now the main page is my homepage, I find my self contributing occasionally, making pedantic alterations, and I now have a user page.

So far the only thing on it is boxes.

Expense

Originally uploaded by nilexuk.

The train is so expensive. The fare – nearly a tenner – is just the start. The killer is that at both ends I have to walk past a series of distractions: evil takeaways, chocolate machines, sandwich shops, coffee and cake concessions, purveyors of paperbacks, market stalls. It was tipping it down last night and I blew a tenner on a taxi home as a treat. It all adds up. And seriously diminishes my chances of eating sensible food at home.

Missed train

Originally uploaded by nilexuk.

With my car still unreliable, I thought I’d take the train to work. Unlike the last time I tried it, when I sat on a non-moving train for ages before it finally departed, this morning’s left bang on time, leaving me and about four other passengers behind cursing its departing carriages.

I would have caught the wretched thing if it hadn’t been for sodding “revenue protection staff” forming a physical barrier and forcing me to waste a valuable 5 minutes buying my ticket instead of deferring the purchase to ontrain staff if and when they deign to show themselves.

So, I find myself with an hour to kill kicking my heels at Nottingham Midland railway station. I spend most of it half-peoplewatching half-paperback novel reading. While Kinsey flies out to Fort Worth, I’m trying to suppress the psychopathy bubbling over that threatens to send me amok among the passengers.

Braying fools in expensive suits and ostentatious cufflinks. Leisure travellers dawdling at the ticket counter, not knowing what type of ticket they want, and in two minds even about their destination. The pillocks who reserve seats then don’t show up. The wanker who wrote the script for the woman who taped the announcements. The cretin who thought up the pricelist for the refreshment trolley. The drunk (at 10am?!) pillocks singing, for some unfathomable reason, the theme from The Italian Job.

It’s a far cry from my normal 35 minutes up the M1 with John Waite and Winnifred Robinson. Even if they do sometimes bring on the same psychopathic reaction.