I can't say I was ever impressed by my boyfriend's car. It was white, for a start. But whether I thought it was cool or not, his choice of vehicle was a white Peugeot and it got him, as he was fond of saying, from A to B. Let's just say if the MTV programme had existed back then, I'd have been writing away sharpish to the nice boys on Pimp My Ride.
In fairness, the car was an integral piece of equipment in the early days of our relationship, when he'd drive from Portadown to Belfast to see me, as I don't drive. Once, he was driving back late and he fell asleep and he and the car ended up on a grass verge by the side of the motorway. He was unhurt, thank goodness. So was the car, unfortunately.
He drives to work, while I cycle, walk or get taxis around town. My mother, who also doesn't drive, liked our car. We'd pick her up the odd time and go on excursions, usually to nowhere more exciting than the supermarket. There is a great one not too far from us called Clare Hall, which sells clothes as well as cabbages. Really cheap clothes that fit curvier people such as myself and my mother. We usually have lunch there after shopping. It's quite the day trip really.
In recent months the car began to sound funny. At first it was just a vague rattling, but that escalated to a sound not dissimilar to a second World War aircraft. We'd be driving along, minding our own business, listening to a bit of Billy Bragg, and people would wind down their windows to tell us there was a terrible noise coming from the engine. I'd feign surprise and adopt this worried expression, but really, I was mortified.
One day I was standing outside the house waiting for him to come home and I heard this noise that suggested the street was about to be invaded by Spitfires. A few minutes later, his car came around the corner. Even when he turned off the engine and got out, the humming noise didn't stop. That day, I began to actively hate the car.
We got it fixed a couple of times and for a few days the car would sound relatively normal, even if it was still white and still a Peugeot. But then one morning my boyfriend would try to start it and I'd hear the thing spluttering and wheezing outside for 10 minutes. Sometimes, driving into town, I'd see an old-fashioned curvy vintage car with a For Sale sign on the front window, and I'd look at him hopefully. He would always say something about "high maintenance" and "ridiculous running costs", and because I was never sure if he was talking about me or the car, I'd shut up and say nothing.
Then one day recently he drove home in his aircraft-car and told me: "I'm getting rid of the car." Oh, happy day! He went up north and managed to persuade a mechanic who really should have known better to swap it for a few hundred quid. Being a decent sort, he even told him the car was making an awful sound, but the mechanic seemed convinced he could fix it. When my boyfriend got back to his mother's house, he discovered he had left his keys at the garage and had to go back to retrieve them. That's when the mechanic told him a gasket or some such item had blown on the Peugeot and it would be virtually impossible to fix. It was a slightly embarrassing moment, but it wasn't our problem anymore.
I had only around five minutes of imagining myself in the car of my dreams - it's bright, convertible and doesn't sound like an aircraft - before he announced he wouldn't be replacing his old motor. For the foreseeable future, we would be carless. The driver in the family admitted that for a while now he had been finding driving a bit of a tyranny. All that sitting in traffic and driving north to see his family; and driving me around was getting him down, apparently.
Before he gave it up for good, I Googled "reasons not to have a car" to make sure we were doing the right thing. I got reasons "not to be in a car when a tornado strikes" and reasons "not to live in a car" and reasons "not to buy a hybrid car" (whatever that may be) and reasons "not to buy a subwoofer for your car" (ditto), but the internet wasn't giving us any encouragement to get rid of the wheels. Then, suddenly, everyone was going on about the price of petrol and that was as good a reason as any.
These days, my boyfriend cycles to work, gets the train up north and is much more relaxed for all that. "But what happens when you just want just to hop in the car and go off for the weekend to Clare," someone asked me the other day. Luckily, that kind of thing doesn't happen to us too often. My mother and I, on the other hand, quite miss our trips to Clare Hall.
