23rd October 2006
Hi all,
Last Tuesday I had to take a train straight from work to East Kilbride. From East Kilbride I had to take a taxi to a local car dealership, and from the car dealership I took our new car and brought it home. All of this means one thing - sayonara Corsa!
Four years ago when my first car left my possession I was willing to give it a heartfelt, sentimental send-off. No such luck for this beast. Rather like a band's troublesome second album, this one isn't remembered with such fondness.
The trouble all began one Sunday night, approximately a fortnight before my brother-in-law was due to get married. Lorraine and I visited a nearby supermarket to pick up some essentials. We got back to the car and it wouldn't start. Not good when you've only had it for nine months.
The following weekend Neil Taylor came to visit. Instead of enjoying a well-earned lie-in on the Saturday morning I was dashing down to a garage to get the car serviced, well ahead of the due date. Why? Because with my brother-in-law's wedding now less than a week away we wanted to make sure the car wouldn't let us down on the day. Thankfully it didn't.
By the end of the year little troublesome aspects were beginning to develop. Suspension springs, engine valves. All small things, but on a repeated basis the expenses began to add up. Before we knew it we were budgeting just about every month for something to repair on the car. Needless to say the affection I held for my old Micra was in short supply.
Of course I didn't have the same memories of racking up the miles in the Corsa that I did with the Micra. Where the Micra took me all around mainland Britain with my friends the Corsa was used largely for getting to and from work, between home and local friends. If I was going anywhere on holiday it would be overseas, so the car would take us to the airport and be left there.
The one exception to that was Cardiff in 2004. A long journey down to Gloucester on the Friday, followed by the remaining distance to Cardiff on the Saturday morning. Having doors in the back with windows we could wind down allowed us to put on a full display - scarves out of both rear windows as well as along the back window itself. It's the one time I looked at that car with any real affection. Perhaps I should have bought a fake daffodil for the dashboard to commemorate it?
Of course having reliably taken us on a 844 mile round-trip it couldn't continue to behave for long. One Saturday morning I took Lorraine to work and half-way there heard a nasty bump followed by an increase in engine noise. The exhaust had gone. Just what we needed when we were trying to save for a big holiday! Somehow we always managed to overcome these incidents, although looking back I'm not quite sure how we did so. It wasn't all smoke and mirrors, often we were sacrificing quite a lot to help keep it on the road.
We did still manage to enjoy our holiday in America. Mind you we didn't risk taking the car to the airport, and upon our return the difference between that and the hire car we picked up in Florida was unbelievable. I loved the Dodge Neon I had driven Stateside, the Corsa just didn't measure up.
From that point the Corsa became something to endure rather than enjoy. I nursed it through MOTs, grudgingly took it in for servicing and refused to buy a cd/mp3 player for something I considered unreliable. Problems I had seen before began to repeat themselves and over time it spewed so much oil over our driveway that George W. Bush has been looking for bogus ways to start a war, just so he has an excuse to invade my property.
By the time Lucy's wedding came around a few months ago a mere service wouldn't be enough. We just couldn't trust it any longer, so we hired a car for the day. The Corsa ran fine on the way to the car hire depot and again when I picked it up, but I wasn't going to trust it on such a big day. Lorraine never would have forgiven me had we missed anything, indeed I wouldn't have forgiven myself for it.
And now it is gone for good. No tears, no flowers. It was cheap, but what the salesman didn't take garages did over the course of a few years. It suited us for a time, but we move on without regrets. It took my wife and dog on numerous days out, as well as my precious daughter home from the hospital after she was born, but for the most part owning it was a pain in the backside, and rightly or wrongly that's how I'll remember it.
Have a good week!
Tony
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